Nearly two years ago, NASA made history when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly “marked” 101955 Bennu to collect a regolith sample from the surface of this asteroid, while the mission won’t return to Earth until late next year. About the orb.
In an update published this week (via Mashable), the agency revealed that OSIRIS-REx would have sunk in Bennu had the spacecraft not immediately launched its thrusters after touching the asteroid’s surface.
“It turns out that the molecules that make up the outside of the Bennu are so loosely packed and bound together so lightly that if a person were to step on the Bennu they would feel very little resistance, as if they were stepping into a hole of plastic balls that are popular in children’s areas.”
This is not what scientists thought they would find in Bennu. When observing the asteroid from Earth, it was expected that its surface would be covered with a soft material resembling a sandy beach. Bennu’s reaction to the landing of Osiris Rex also puzzled scientists, after a short interaction with the asteroid, the spacecraft left A hole 26 feet (8 m) wide, in lab tests, the capture procedure “barely made a hole.”
After analyzing data from the spacecraft, they found that it encountered the same amount of resistance that anyone on Earth would feel while depressing the piston in a French pressure coffee pot, OSIRIS-REx team scientist Ron Blouse said: “By the time we launched our thrusts to leave the surface We were still drowning in the asteroid.”
According to NASA, its findings on Bennu could help scientists better explain distant observations of other asteroids.
In turn, this could help the agency design future asteroid missions. “I think we’re just beginning to understand what these bodies are, because they behave in very unexpected ways,” said Patrick Michel, a member of the OSIRIS-REx team.