A spacecraft carrying pristine asteroid samples and 4,000 megabytes of data is about to fly home from the asteroid Bennu .
The spacecraft, NASA’s Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security – Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx until May 10, 2021
During its most recent and final up-close approach of Bennu, OSIRIS-REx imaged the asteroid for 5.9 hours, which is more than one full rotation of the asteroid. The spacecraft flew within 2.1 miles (3.5 kilometers) of Bennu’s surface, according to a recent statement from NASA Related: NASA spacecraft makes historic attempt to snag samples of asteroid Bennu
The pebbles and bits that OSIRIS-REx collected on Bennu during its touchdown on the asteroid’s surface in October 2020 will help scientists learn about the asteroid’s composition, but the effect that the retrieval had to Bennu’s surface — which involved touching down onto the rock for seconds and blowing nitrogen gas onto the asteroid’s surface
Leilah McCarthy, Flight Navigator from the engineering company KinetX, processed navigation images to help NASA’s OSIRIS-REx complete its final flyby of Bennu. (Image credit: KinetX Inc./Coralie Adam)
“By surveying the distribution of the excavated material around the… site, we will learn more about the nature of the surface and subsurface materials along with the mechanical properties of the asteroid,” Dr. Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, said in the NASA statement.
It will take at least until April 13 for the spacecraft’s data and pictures from this final flyby to reach the mission team, according to NASA. Bennu’s distance from Earth, coupled with the need to share the Deep Space Network Voyager Perseverance
Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
