OSIRIS-REx Would Have Sunk Deep into Asteroid Bennu if it Tried to Land - by ET_Exists
Before OSIRIS-REx arrived at Bennu, the mission team observed the asteroid using Earth- and space-based telescopes expecting to find a surface that resembled a smooth, sandy beach. Instead, upon the spacecraft’s arrival at Bennu in December 2018, the team was surprised to find a surface littered with boulders andMosaic image of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 PolyCam images collected on Dec. 2, 2018, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a range of 24 km .
“What we saw was a huge wall of debris radiating out from the sample site,” Lauretta said. “We were like, ‘Holy cow!’” The mission team was even more startled when they saw the 8-meter wide crater that TAGSAM left despite how gently the spacecraft had touched the surface to collect the sample. This result was in stark contrast to lab tests carried out before the mission.
“Every time we tested the sample pickup procedure in the lab, we barely made a divot,” Lauretta said. A few months after sample collection, the team sent OSIRIS-REx back to take more images of Bennu’s surface “to see how big of a mess we made,” Lauretta said. These studies are intriguing since it challenges previous notions about the makeup of asteroids, which could aid in the design of future missions as well as developing methods to protect Earth form asteroid impacts. If asteroids are as loosely packed as Bennu, it’s possible they could simply break up in the Earth’s atmosphere, posing a different type of hazard than more solid asteroids.
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