NASA’s asteroid-sampling spacecraft had a shut to-loss of life ride at Bennu, based on the mission crew.
In October 2020, the agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft almost sank into the floor of the rubbly asteroid while picking up rocks for shipment to Earth in 2023, crew individuals published Thursday (July 7). The spacecraft ultimate escaped getting caught or sinking into oblivion internal Bennu by firing its thrusters at the supreme moment.
“We anticipated the floor to be pretty rigid,” predominant investigator Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the College of Arizona, recommended Location.com. “We seen a large wall of debris flying away from the sample place of abode. For spacecraft operators, it used to be in fact provoking.”
Read more: Dramatic sampling presentations asteroid Bennu is nothing luxuriate in scientists anticipated
Linked: Trot shotgun with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid probe as it buzzes Bennu (video)
Now that the spacecraft (more formally is understood as Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) is safely on its manner abet to our planet to bring its precious cargo, scientists are digging into the science implications of the dramatic moment.
“It turns out that the particles making up Bennu’s exterior are so loosely packed and frivolously sure to every varied that they act more luxuriate in a fluid than a solid,” Lauretta acknowledged in a College of Arizona assertion (opens in unique tab).
That construction is why the OSIRIS-REx sampling probe had this sort of shut name, he and his colleagues certain. The free floor, made up of particles jostling against every varied luxuriate in plastic balls in a younger of us’s play place, has implications for the manner asteroids had been fashioned and also for planetary protection ways to defend against doubtless rogue predicament rocks coming shut to our planet, NASA added in a 2d assertion (opens in unique tab).
Photos from the mission showed a giraffe-scale crater left at the abet of from the transient touchdown, scarring the floor as some distance as 26 feet (8-meters) wide. That used to be nothing luxuriate in the dinky divot investigators predicted from simulations.
The encounter used to be a in fact shut name for the spacecraft, mission personnel now whine. Where scientists had anticipated to search out a firm floor, the spacecraft experienced resistance identical to that wanted to filter a French press coffee maker, they acknowledged.
“By the level we fired our thrusters to leave the floor, we had been light plunging into the asteroid,” Ron Ballouz, an OSIRIS-REx scientist based at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, acknowledged in the College of Arizona assertion.
“I suspect we’re light at the starting of working out what these our bodies are, because they behave in very counterintuitive systems,” Patrick Michel, an OSIRIS-REx crew member and asteroid scientist at Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, acknowledged in the NASA assertion.
Location.com senior creator Tereza Pultarova contributed reporting to this story. Observe Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in unique tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in unique tab) and on Facebook (opens in unique tab).