![]() ![]() The Bennu sample is due to land in September 2023. “It may be that OSIRIS-REx would have gone deeper inside the asteroid, which is both fascinating and scary,” said study coauthor Patrick Michel, an OSIRIS-REx scientist and director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France.įortunately, the spacecraft and its prized sample are heading back to Earth. So what might have happened if the spacecraft’s thrusters didn’t fire right away? NASA spacecraft carrying history-making asteroid sample now heading toward Earth This illustration shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft departing asteroid Bennu to begin its two-year journey back to Earth. “If Bennu was completely packed, that would imply nearly solid rock, but we found a lot of void space in the surface,” said study coauthor Kevin Walsh, a member of the OSIRIS-REx science team from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement. It’s about one-third of a mile (500 meters) wide. Ballouz is a coauthor of a pair of July studies released in the journals Science and Science Advances about the discovery.īennu is a rubble-pile asteroid shaped like a spinning top, composed of rocks bound together by gravity. ![]() “By the time we fired our thrusters to leave the surface we were still plunging into the asteroid,” said Ron Ballouz, an OSIRIS-REx scientist based at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, in a statement. If the spacecraft hadn’t fired its thruster to back away after its quick collection of dust and rocks, it might have sunk right into the asteroid. Apparently, Bennu’s exterior is made of loosely packed particles that aren’t bound together very securely, based on what happened as the spacecraft collected a sample. The new revelation comes after the space agency successfully collected a sample from the asteroid in October 2020.ĭuring the historic collection event, the sampling head of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sank 1.6 feet (0.5 meter) into the surface of the asteroid. A near-Earth asteroid named Bennu has turned out to be full of surprises – the latest of which is the fact that it has a surface similar to a pit of plastic balls, according to NASA scientists. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |