OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrives at Bennu

[ilan]

OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrives at Bennu
Eleanor Imster in SPACE | December 3, 2018

After traveling through space for more than 2 years, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived on Monday at its destination, asteroid Bennu.


This series of images taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows Bennu in one full rotation from a distance of around 50 miles (80 km).
The spacecraft’s PolyCam camera obtained the thirty-six 2.2-millisecond frames over a period of 4 hours and 18 minutes. Image via NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Arizona.

After traveling through space for more than two years and over two billion kilometers, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at its destination, asteroid Bennu, today (Monday, December 3, 2018).

OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) launched in September 2016 and has been slowly approaching Bennu. OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first mission to visit a near-Earth asteroid, survey the surface, collect a sample and deliver it back to Earth. The spacecraft will spend almost a year surveying the asteroid with the goal of selecting a location that is safe and scientifically interesting to collect the sample.

That asteroid sample is expected to return to Earth via free fall from space, until it reaches an altitude of 20.8 miles (33.5 km), when a first parachute will deploy. At 1.9 miles (3 km), the main parachute will be released, bringing the capsule with its precious cargo from Bennu in for a soft landing in the Utah desert on September 24, 2023.
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So far, it has been a 1.2 billion-mile (2 billion-kilometer) journey for OSIRIS-REx. - ilan