IGX

NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft touches down on asteroid Bennu



The mission marks the space agency's first landing on an asteroid.

Four years after launching from Earth, NASA's Osiris-Rex on Tuesday made a historic and brief landing on potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu, over 200 million miles away.

The spacecraft traveled all that way to perform a short touch-and-go maneuver with the goal of collecting a sample from the asteroid's surface and transporting it back to Earth for study.

The back-away burn is complete I'm now moving to a safe distance away from Bennu. pic.twitter.com/bXk2ufSneS
— NASA's OSIRIS-REx (@OSIRISREx) October 20, 2020

We won't know until Wednesday whether Osiris-Rex succeeded in grabbing a space science souvenir, but on Tuesday, NASA TV reported the spacecraft's robotic sampling arm, named Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (Tagsam), did touch down on Bennu for about 15 seconds. During the brief contact, it performed what amounts to a cosmic pickpocketing maneuver.

https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-osiris-r ... oid-bennu/

Pretty sure only Japan has successfully done this on Ryugu.

They're gonna stream video of the landing here, which is pretty sick: https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

DAS RITE!!!!!!

I am pretty hyped about this.

Kazuya Mishima wrote: ↑Wed Oct 21, 2020 8:57 pm DAS RITE!!!!!!

Don't ruin it for me!

Grandpa's Spells wrote: ↑Wed Oct 21, 2020 9:06 pm I am pretty hyped about this.

It's very neat, and another example of the great things that have been happening in US space exploration in recent years.