Tag: asteroid bennu

A NASA Mission Is About To Capture Carbon-Rich Dust From a Former Water World

sciencehabit writes: OSIRIS-REx is ready to get the goods. On 20 October, after several years of patient study of its enigmatic target, NASA’s $800 million spacecraft will finally stretch out its robotic arm, swoop to the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and sweep up some dust and pebbles. The encounter, 334 million kilometers from Earth, will last about 10 seconds….

Asteroid Bennu was once part of a space rock with flowing water

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has performed detailed analyses of the asteroid Bennu, which revealed signs of ancient flowing water Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2256626-asteroid-bennu-was-once-part-of-a-space-rock-with-flowing-water/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

OSIRIS-REx mission researchers detail history of asteroid Bennu

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft mission, launched on Sept. 8, 2016, is the first U.S. mission designed to retrieve a pristine sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth for further study. The mission’s target is Bennu, a carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid that is potentially hazardous, representing an approximately 1 in 2,700 chance of impacting the Earth late in the 22nd century. Source:…

US probe to touch down on asteroid Bennu on October 20

After a four-year journey, NASA’s robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx will descend to asteroid Bennu’s boulder-strewn surface on October 20, touching down for a few seconds to collect rock and dust samples, the agency said Thursday. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-probe-asteroid-bennu-october.html…

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx to asteroid Bennu: ‘You’ve got a little Vesta on you’

In an interplanetary faux pas, it appears some pieces of asteroid Vesta ended up on asteroid Bennu, according to observations from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The new result sheds light on the intricate orbital dance of asteroids and on the violent origin of Bennu, which is a “rubble pile” asteroid that coalesced from the fragments of a massive collision. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-nasa-osiris-rex-asteroid-bennu-youve.html…

How small particles could reshape Bennu and other asteroids

In January 2019, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was orbiting asteroid Bennu when the spacecraft’s cameras caught something unexpected: Thousands of tiny bits of material, some just the size of marbles, began to bounce off the surface of the asteroid—like a game of ping-pong in space. Since then, many such particle ejection events have been observed at Bennu’s surface. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-small-particles-reshape-bennu-asteroids.html…