To their delight, newly acquired close-ups of the asteroid closely match their predictions.īut there’s still a lot to learn about the object, said University of Arizona Planetary Scientist Bashar Rizk, who oversees three of OSIRIS-REx’s cameras. And since Bennu has a 1-in-2,700 chance of impacting Earth about 200 years from now, researchers figure it would be good to glean some insights about the asteroid’s fate - and how it might intersect with our own.īennu is so small, dark and distant (about 75 million miles from Earth at the moment) that scientists could only theorize about what it might look like when they launched OSIRIS-REx two years ago. They may also uncover potentially useful natural resources such as organic molecules and precious metals. Studying the sample in terrestrial labs, scientists hope to uncover clues about the birth of the planets and the origins of Earth’s water and life. It will be the largest planetary sample retrieved since the Apollo era, when astronauts brought rocks back from the moon. In a kiss-like manoeuvre, the spacecraft’s robotic arm will collect some material from Bennu’s surface, then sling the sample back toward Earth. OSIRIS-REx will spend the next 18 months there, surveying the landscape and probing Bennu’s chemical makeup before finally selecting what piece of the asteroid it wants to bring back home. OSIRIS-REx was finally at the doorstep of its new home.īennu is a carbonaceous asteroid - a primitive, carbon-rich piece of debris left over from the process that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Soon an image of the asteroid appeared on the mission control screens: a diamond-shaped body with a rough, speckled exterior. OSIRIS-REx was within 12 miles of Bennu’s surface - about the distance between the White House and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which manages the spacecraft.
"I think that, overall, the situation has improved."Read more of this story at Slashdot.Then Cerna grinned and spread his arms out wide. "The impact probability went up just a little bit but it's not a significant change, the impact probability is pretty much the same," lead author Davide Farnocchia, who works at NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies in California, said during a news conference held Wednesday (Aug. And besides, the lessons the research offers for asteroid trajectory calculation could reduce concerns about potential impacts by other asteroids more than enough to compensate. Technically, that's a small increase in risk, but the scientists behind the new research say they aren't worried about a potential impact. While a slightly higher risk than past estimates, it represents a minuscule change in an already minuscule risk, NASA said. From the report: Estimates produced before OSIRIS-REx arrived at the space rock tallied the cumulative probability of a Bennu impact between the years 21 at 1 in 2,700, according to NASA. "As a result, scientists behind new research now say they're confident that the asteroid's total impact probability through 2300 is just 1 in 1,750," reports. NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been orbiting an asteroid called Bennu for more than two years to fine-tune the agency's existing models of its trajectory.
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