Bennu !
Not long ago
Skyward
OSIRIS-REx , a spacecraft sponsored by the University of Arizona and flown by NASA gently touched the surface of asteroid No . by David 101955 , an
Levy asteroid named Bennu , tried to grab some material , and then quickly took off again . It was the first try , but it was a huge success ! The craft gathered more than twice what was expected — so much that some small pieces of material started to leak out . Of course , if all the sample leaked out , then there was no sample . But that won ’ t happen . NASA plans to transfer the material to a safe storage container earlier than expected , and then the sample will be safe . The mission , run jointly by NASA and the University of Arizona , cost the U . S . taxpayers about 800 million dollars , plus about 185 million for the launch aboard an Atlas V rocket . The Osiris-Rex is an acronym for Origins , Spectral Interpretation , Resource Identification , Security , Regolith Explorer . Asteroid Bennu is an interesting choice . Bennu was the name for an Egyptian mythological bird associated with creation , the Sun , and rebirth . But much as the name might inspire us to look back at the early days of our solar system ( which it does ), that ’ s not the real reason this particular asteroid was chosen . Bennu is a C-type asteroid . It is also a sort of time capsule dating back to the birth and early evolution of the solar system . C is for carbonaceous asteroid , but it is a B sub-type because it is primitive . The reason for this is that it had undergone almost no geological change since it formed .
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Hello ,
COURTESY
This photograph of asteroid Bennu is a a composite of images taken from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on December 2 , 2018 .
Especially if you pay taxes to the government of the United States , you may wonder why more than 800 million dollars was sent to this distant spot of light in the sky . I could begin to answer this by saying that Bennu ’ s sample will teach us about what the solar system was made of at its formation . From that , Bennu could give us a healthy idea about what the Earth itself was like at its birth . Sometime after it was formed , its orbit changed so that now , every few dozen years it gets pretty close to Earth . There is a very small chance that it might hit Earth in the distant future . Dolores Hill , a long-time member of the OSIRIS-Rex team adds : “ NASA sent this mission to Bennu , a primitive body , to return a pristine , protected sample so we could better understand the beginning and history of the solar system , formation of organic compounds important to life , and understand how main-belt asteroids migrate to the inner solar system to become near-Earth asteroids .” All this is fine , but couldn ’ t that money be better spent on Earth , to feed the starving , cure those afflicted with coronavirus , house the homeless , and do all the other things we thought we could do when