I saw this announcement last night on Space.com – NASA’s first attempt to sample an asteroid in space made a mess. It’s the best mess ever, scientists say.: https://www.space.com/nasa-osiris-rex-asteroid-bennu-sampling-results Worth a read if you are into things space-related. The article has a video and several photos. It’s a longer article, but you can read more in the link.
By October 21, 2020
The OSIRIS-REx probe’s encounter with asteroid Bennu appeared flawless.
A NASA spacecraft has really made a mess of things on the asteroid Bennu, and scientists are thrilled.
The spacecraft, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe, briefly touched down on Bennu Tuesday afternoon (Oct. 21) in the space agency’s first-ever attempt to collect samples of an asteroid. It will take time to confirm if OSIRIS-REx did, in fact, collect pieces of Bennu, but so far everything appears to have gone as planned.
“We really did kind of make a mess on the surface of this asteroid. But it’s a good mess,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona, told reporters from the mission’s Lockheed Martin control center in Littleton, Colorado. “It’s the kind of mess we were hoping for.”
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5,400th post
Fascinating!
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