After almost two years in orbit at asteroid Bennu it’s nearly go time for OSIRIS-REx—or, should I say, Touch-and-Go time! Later today, October 20, starting at 1:50 p.m. EDT (17:50 UTC) the van-sized spacecraft will begin its descent toward the surface of Bennu, culminating in the attempt to siphon up at least 60 grams of…
Tag: asteroid
Get to Know Bennu Better Before OSIRIS-REx’s Sample Grab
It’s almost TAG time! On October 20, 2020 NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will slowly descend from its orbit 2,500 feet (770 meters) above Bennu to briefly touch the asteroid’s pebbly surface with its TAGSAM instrument, quickly sucking in and filter-capturing a small amount of material which will be returned to Earth for scientific study in 2023….
Ceres’ Salty Mound is the Result of Ongoing Geologic Activity
First observed with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003, the curious bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres—the largest world in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter—was brought into exquisite focus with the arrival of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft in 2015. The largest and brightest of these spots—a single 340-meter-high mound named Cerealia Facula…
Sunlight Can Crack Rocks on Asteroids
Here on Earth the surfaces of pretty much all but the most freshly-exposed (geologically-speaking, of course) rock surfaces exhibit the effects of atmospheric weathering—from rain, snow, and ice to wind, dust-blown sand, flowing water, and extreme heat. And underlying all of that are the relentless forces of tectonic activity. But on dry, airless, and tectonically…
Meet Pallas, the Asteroid That Used to Be a Planet (But Now Looks Like a Golf Ball)
No, it’s not a golf ball fished out of the lake; this is an image of Pallas, the third most massive object in the main asteroid belt after Ceres and Vesta. New 3D models made from observations taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope show details of Pallas like never before possible,…
The Closest Image of Asteroid Bennu Yet
(From the OSIRIS-REx mission site) Captured on April 14, 2020, this image shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s sampling arm – called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) – and asteroid Bennu during the mission’s Checkpoint Rehearsal. The chosen sample site “Nightingale” is visible in the left of the image frame, located in the relatively clear, dark patch….
The First-Known Interstellar Asteroid is Like a Giant Tumbling Torpedo
Remember that comet-no-wait-asteroid astronomers discovered in October on a high-velocity hyperbolic orbit around the Sun? It has been determined that the object must be of interstellar origin and, based on follow-up observations over the past several weeks, it’s shaped like nothing that’s ever been seen before.
Asteroid 2014 JO25 Gets Some Sweet Radar Love
This is our best look yet at asteroid 2014 JO25, which made its closest pass by Earth for at least the next 500 years on April 19, 2017. The animation above is composed of radar observations made from NASA’s Goldstone facility in California when the asteroid was between 1.53 and 1.61 million miles away. These…
Worried About Asteroid 2014 JO25? Don’t Be.
SPACE NEWS FLASH: On Wednesday, April 19, the asteroid 2014 JO25 will pass by Earth, coming as close as about 1.1 million miles at 12:24 UTC (8:24 a.m. EDT / 5:24 a.m. PDT). Yes, this asteroid is fairly large—just under half a mile across—and is traveling very fast—about 21 miles a second— BUT even so it…
NEAR Showed Us a Rocky World of Love
This image of the asteroid Eros—named after the Greek god of love—was captured on March 3, 2000, by NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft. It’s actually a mosaic of six separate images acquired from a distance of 127 miles from the 20-mile-wide asteroid, and reveals many large boulders scattered across the surface down to about 160 feet in…
OSIRIS-REx Captures a Picture of Jupiter from L4
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx may be designed to study asteroids close up but recently it’s captured a view of something farther away and much, much larger: the giant planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons at a distance of over 400 million miles! The image was taken on Feb. 12, 2017, when the spacecraft was 76 million…
Chelyabinsk: a Blast From the Not-Too-Distant Past (or, How’s That Space Program Coming Along?)
Four years ago today an explosion shattered the morning sky over the Chelyabinsk region in southwestern Russia, the result of a 60-foot-wide fragment of an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere at over 40,000 mph and brilliantly blowing itself to smithereens at 97,000 feet up. Even at that altitude, the resulting flash of light and air blast was powerful…
Lights in the Dark 