OSIRIS-REx is about to get up close and personal with asteroid Bennu
Image: NASA
The spacecraft stealing these rocks is called OSIRIS-REx, part of the first-ever NASA mission tasked with returning samples of an asteroid back to Earth. Launched in September of 2016, OSIRIS-REx spent two years traveling to an asteroid named Bennu., the spacecraft has been circling the asteroid and mapping it in excruciating detail, in order to find just the right spot to scoop up a sample.
But none of that can happen if OSIRIS-REx doesn’t pull off its most important task, which is why tomorrow is such a big day for the mission team. And since it takes up to 18 minutes to get one signal out to OSIRIS-REx at the moment, the spacecraft must execute everything by itself. Then OSIRIS-REx arrived at Bennu and snapped the first up-close images of the asteroid. “Once we started to see the surface of Bennu, we knew that we were going to have to change our approach,” says Freund.than everyone had expected, with boulders the size of buildings dotting its surface. Rocky terrain can be tricky to navigate around, and if the spacecraft comes in contact with a particularly large boulder, the vehicle could tip over and veer off course.
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