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Should our species in our lifetimes ever be so unlucky as to actually face a potentially apocalyptic near-Earth object, Binzel noted that the elegant solutions depicted in cinema are far, far from what we would really have at our disposal.

As navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Center for Near-Earth Object Studies Davide Farnocchia told CNN, “The longer we track an asteroid, the more precise the prediction. As we collect additional data, the uncertainty in the position of 2024 YR4 in 2032 will decrease. Given that the impact probability is only 1%, it is 99% likely that the Earth will eventually fall outside the swath of possible positions and that the probability would fall to zero.”

And before the decade’s end, an asteroid-hunting space-based telescope, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, will be launched; with its infrared eye, it is set to find almost all the city killers orbiting perilously close to the planet.

It also mandates minimum spending levels on several ongoing missions, including $360 million for the Dragonfly rotocopter to Titan, Saturn’s large moon, and $210 million for the Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, a space telescope to detect hazardous asteroids.

OSIRIS-REx collected its specimen from Bennu, a small, carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999 and classified as a "near-Earth object" because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years, though the odds of an impact are considered remote.