NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has successfully conducted a sampling mission on the carbon-heavy asteroid Bennu, shortly after researchers theorized the asteroid’s spin is responsible for its apparently soft, or even hollow, center.
NASA announced in an October 21 news release that OSIRIS-REx’s Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event on Bennu – some 200 million miles away – returned 82 SamCam images over a five-minute period after touching down at sample site Nightingale.
Burns – Nightingale Hazard Map and TAG Location
“The team on Earth received confirmation at 6:08 p.m. EDT that successful touchdown occurred,” the release read.
A study published in Science Advances days prior to the TAG mission evaluated the strength of Bennu’s gravity field, as well as the gravity field measurement of the ejected particles that would temporarily orbit Bennu “before reimpacting the surface or escaping from the asteroid.”
“If its core has a low density, it’s going to be easier to pull the entire asteroid apart,” detailed study lead Daniel Scheeres, a professor in University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Aerospace Engineering Science.
Researchers believe this is due to the asteroid’s spin continuously pushing once-compacted material to Bennu’s surface.
“If you can measure the gravity field with enough precision, that places hard constraints on where the mass is located, even if you can’t see it directly,” co-author Andrew French noted.
However, that is simply his current estimate on Bennu’s fate.
“None of them have sat out there unchanging since the dawn of the solar system,” Scheeres said of asteroids. “They’re being changed by things like sunlight affecting how they spin and collisions with other asteroids.”
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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