Apart from planets and moon, NASA is now targeting asteroids to land on and its spacecraft has even captured the first picture of the target asteroid speeding across space.
NASA’s asteroid-sample spacecraft named OSIRIS-REx has taken its first pictures of the deep-space target it’s moving towards, which is 1,650-foot-wide asteroid ‘Bennu’ orbiting the Sun.
As per The Verge, the picture was taken from a distance of 1.4 million miles away and shows Bennu as pixels of light moving across space. “I know Bennu is only a point of light here, but many of us have been working for years and years and years to get this first image down,” said Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for OSIRIS-Rex.
Here it is - the first image of Bennu. This milestone is incredibly important to the @OSIRISREx team. Let the scientific journey commence! pic.twitter.com/MkzH4N2Iwj
— Dante Lauretta (@DSLauretta) August 24, 2018
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The plan is to land the $800 million mission on Bennu where it will collect a small sample, up to 4.4 pounds, of material from the asteroid’s surface and bring them back to Earth for further analysis. The analysis will help scientists know about what the Solar System was like when it was forming some 4.5 billion years ago.
The spacecraft that has been on its way since the past two years since September 2016 is expected to reach Bennu on December 3 this year where it will insert itself into the rock’s orbit on December 31 after a series of close flybys. It will spend entire 2019 performing an extensive mapping campaign of the asteroid’s surface. As soon as the right spot is located to sample, the craft will tap into Bennu’s surface sometime in mid-2020, grab the sample, and head back to Earth in March 2021 before finally landing to Earth in September 2023, as detailed by Space.com.
“Now that OSIRIS-REx is close enough to observe Bennu, the mission team will spend the next few months learning as much as possible about Bennu’s size, shape, surface features and surroundings before the spacecraft arrives at the asteroid. After spending so long planning for this moment, I can’t wait to see what Bennu reveals to us,” expressed Lauretta.