Following a nearly three-year journey through space, the canister containing samples from asteroid Bennu has finally been opened.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on its way to Earth to drop off rocky samples from asteroid Bennu on Sunday, marking NASA’s first attempt to retrieve a piece of a pure space rock.
NASA’s $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission launched to space in September 2016 with a simple, albeit ambitious, objective: travel to a distant asteroid and bring back a sample of it.
An asteroid-hunting algorithm set to be implemented in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 10-year survey spotted its first potentially hazardous asteroid, proving the algorithm’s capabilities in advance of the observatory’s opening.
The prominent astrophysicist and musician Brian May is co-authoring a three-dimensional atlas of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, an 85-million-ton hunk of rock orbiting the Sun.
After landing on an asteroid nearly three years ago to scoop up a sample from its rocky surface, the OSIRIS-REx mission is finally in the homestretch. NASA is preparing for the special delivery of the rocky sample next month and the agency just pulled off the most realistic rehearsal for the big day.