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oom At 12:37 a.m. EDT (10:37 a.m. MDT), a helicopter gently placed NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample capsule, attached to the end of a 100-foot cable, on the ground outside a hangar on the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. Two technicians on the ground helped guide the capsule down. Once the helicopter line was detached and the helicopter had departed, the clean room team removed the capsule from its metal transport cradle. They loaded the capsule onto a cart and wheeled it into the hangar where a temporary clean room had been set up. In the hangar, the capsule...

NASA scientists have predicted there is a chance that a massive asteroid they have been tracking could smash into earth in the year 2182, potentially devastating an area the size of Texas. Bennu, a Near-Earth Object (NEO), orbits the earth roughly every six years and has been on the space agency’s radar since 1999 when it was first discovered. There have been three close encounters involving Bennu in 1999, 2005, and 2011, scientists said. On September 25, 2135, Bennu will make a close fly-by past Earth and has a miniscule chance through a pass through a “gravitational keyhole” that would...

NASA has revealed that while collecting samples from the asteroid Bennu in October of 2020, the spacecraft's sampler arm sank over a foot in the loosely packed surface layer, as if there was no resistance. The spacecraft narrowly avoided being swallowed by firing up its thrusters and moving away from the surface. University of Arizona Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences, Dante Lauretta, revealed that the "particles making up Bennu's exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that they act more like a fluid than a solid." Experts behind the mission likened the experience to jumping into...

OSIRIS REx Spacecraft Leaving Bennu Surface NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft leaving the surface of asteroid Bennu after collecting a sample. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab/SVS Scientists have learned something astonishing after analyzing data gathered when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample from asteroid Bennu in October 2020. The spacecraft would have sunk into the asteroid had it not fired its thrusters to back away immediately after it grabbed its sample of dust and rock from Bennu’s surface. “Our expectations about the asteroid’s surface were completely wrong.” — Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx Unexpectedly, it turns out that the...

The chance of asteroid Bennu colliding with Earth by the year 2300 CE is a little higher than we thought. But you don't need to whip out your asteroid strike survival handbook just yet. According to new calculations based on data gathered by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which orbited and sampled the asteroid, the probability of Bennu colliding with our home planet in that timeframe is just 0.057 percent – or one chance in 1,750. The date we have to worry about the most is over 150 years away – 24 September 2182. On that date, Bennu will have a 0.037...

Data gathered during the years NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spent zipping around asteroid Bennu has allowed scientists to update the risk posed by this potentially hazardous near-Earth object. The spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is currently en route to Earth, carrying surface samples it collected from asteroid Bennu. From December 2018 to May 2021, the NASA spacecraft studied the gigantic rubble pile from every angle, measuring its size, shape, mass, composition, spin, orbital trajectory, and other important characteristics. Bennu is a primitive carbonaceous asteroid, so by studying this object, scientists can make inferences about what our solar system was like during its formative period. But...

Two days after touching down on asteroid Bennu, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission team received on Thursday, Oct. 22, images that confirm the spacecraft has collected more than enough material to meet one of its main mission requirements -- acquiring at least 2 ounces (60 grams) of the asteroid's surface material.

Make sure to go to the link and click on the hotlink highlighted as "Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event" for a video of the touchdown. A photo sequence is also shown in the last hotlink in the Explanation or by clicking on the image at the link. Explanation: On October 20, after a careful approach to the boulder-strewn surface, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid Bennu. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to crush some of the rocks in this snapshot. The close-up scene was recorded by the spacecraft's SamCam...

Want a little reminder of how amazingly clever we humans can be? Yesterday, from a distance of more than 320 million kilometres (200 million miles) away, NASA scientists piloted a spacecraft to gently touch down on a spinning asteroid, collecting a sample of surface rubble to bring back home to Earth. At 6:08 PM EDT, the signal from spacecraft OSIRIS-REx reached Earth to let us know that it had successfully touched down at the Nightingale collection site on asteroid Bennu, within a metre (three feet) of its target, and safely bounced back up again after just 6 seconds of contact....

After orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Bennu for nearly two years, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully touched down and reached out its robotic arm to collect a sample from the asteroid's surface on Tuesday. That sample will be returned to Earth in 2023. To achieve this historic first for NASA, a van-size spacecraft had to briefly touch down its arm in a landing site called Nightingale. The site is the width of a few parking spaces. The arm reached out to collect a sample, which could be between 2 ounces and 2 kilograms. Then, the spacecraft backed away to safety.

Tuesday, October 20 1:20 to 6:30 p.m. – Live stream animation displaying OSIRIS-REx’s sample collection activities in real time. The animation commences with the spacecraft’s slew into position for the Orbit Departure Maneuver and runs through the entire sequence of TAG events, concluding after the spacecraft’s back-away burn. Event will be broadcast on the mission’s website. 5 to 6:30 p.m. – Live broadcast from Lockheed Martin of OSIRIS-REx’s descent to the surface of Bennu and attempt at sample collection. Hosted by Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, and Michelle Thaller, science communicator at Goddard, the broadcast...

In just a few days, NASA is going to bounce its probe OSIRIS-REx off asteroid Bennu. The mission will collect a sample from the asteroid, and return it to Earth for closer study - one of the first missions of its kind. That return sample will help us to understand not just asteroids, but the earliest days of the Solar System's existence. However, that is not the sole mission of OSIRIS-REx. The probe arrived in Bennu orbit in December of 2018, and since that time has been using its suite of instruments to learn as much as it can about...

OSIRIS-REx — an international sample-return mission led by NASA and joined by science team members from Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy, and with an instrument provided through the Canadian Space Agency — is less than one month away from performing a Touch-And-Go sample collection maneuver to return portions of asteroid Bennu to Earth. Meanwhile, science teams have observed regular material shedding activity from the near Earth object — an unexpected find that allows scientists to better understand the dynamic little worlds littered throughout the inner solar system.

The probe has been orbiting the asteroid since 2018 and has been preparing to collect a chunk of asteroid rock, which it will bring back to Earth in 2023. OSIRIS-REx is set to take the sample from the site named Nightingale on Oct. 20, 2020, but on May 26 the spacecraft took a dive toward Osprey, the backup sample collection site for the mission. OSIRIS-REx dropped down to just 820 feet (250 meters) above the site, which is the closest the spacecraft has been to Osprey. During the operation, the probe took 347 images from PolyCam, one of three cameras...

While it has a face only an astrogeologist could love, that rubble could be as old as the solar system itself. Bennu is also number two on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard scale, meaning there’s a (slight) chance it could impact Earth very violently in around 150 years. And now, Bennu has the distinction of being the subject of the highest resolution mosaic ever made of any planetary body. The image was collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft between March 7th and April 19th, 2019. At the time, it was about 2 to 3 miles from the surface of the 1,600...

More space rocks seem to be approaching Earth’s territory, and a new report reveals another one may bring in disasters. NASA has spotted an asteroid traveling at 63,000 miles per hour, and there is a possibility that it can impact the Earth. Express reports that the space agency recently tracked down an asteroid named 101955 Bennu but formally known as 1999 RQ36, hurtling towards Earth at a rapid speed of 63,000 miles per hour. NASA has not only labeled this a Potentially Hazardous Object or PHO, but they have also classified RQ36 with the second-highest rating on the Palermo Technical...

NASA Prepares to Snatch Samples of ‘Apocalypse Asteroid’ Bennu in 2020 as it Zooms Through Space 10:05 14.08.2019 Considered a “silent witness to titanic events in the solar system’s 4.6 billion year history” by NASA researchers, Bennu is a 1,600-foot rock that was branded an "apocalypse asteroid", located between Earth and Mars, weighing 87 million tonnes and currently orbiting the Sun. A NASA mission has spent over 8 months sizing up the massive asteroid Bennu, located between Earth and Mars, to finally select four areas on its surface as possible sampling sites for its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to grab a piece...

The English tabloid Express ran a story today (Feb. 11) with the headline "NASA warn 'APOCALYPSE asteroid' Bennu WILL appear in the sky this Valentine's Day." The piece claimed that the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid Bennu — "a doomsday asteroid which has a high probability of impacting Earth in one hundred years time" — will be "visible to the naked eye" on the night of Feb. 14, slightly to the right of Mars. This is entirely wrong. First of all, Bennu is not an "apocalypse asteroid," and NASA never labeled it such. (Agency scientists aren't known for their hyperbolic and...

Bennu has a shape that looks a bit like a spinning top. It is roughly 500 meters (1,640 feet) in diameter and orbits the sun once every 1.2 years, or 436.604 days. Every six years or so, it comes very close to Earth — about 0.002 AU, according to the University of Arizona. (... well within the orbit of Earth's moon.) Bennu is part of a small class of carbonaceous (dark) asteroids that likely have primitive materials in them. Called a B-type class, Bennu and other asteroids like it have materials such as volatiles (compounds with a low boiling point),...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft has obtained new images of Bennu, a 1,614-foot (492 m) wide asteroid that orbits the Sun relatively close to the Earth.