bennu
Latest
NASA's OSIRIS-REx has started orbiting asteroid Bennu
After NASA's OSIRIS-REx arrived at asteroid Bennu in early December, its ground team quickly started measuring and mapping out the celestial body. They needed all the information they could get in order to enter Bennu's orbit, since the asteroid has such a small gravity pull. Sounds like the scientists were able to get what they needed, because OSIRIS-REx has successfully started circling the asteroid at 2:43 PM ET on December 31st.
OSIRIS-REx spacecraft already found water on its target asteroid
It didn't take long for NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to glean valuable insights from the asteroid Bennu. The vessel has helped scientists discover water trapped inside Bennu's clays thanks to its two spectrometers, which spotted the hydroxyls (bonded hydrogen and oxygen atoms) that indicate interaction with water. Researchers believe Bennu's parent astroid hosted liquid water at one point, and these traces carried over to the smaller space rock.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has arrived at the asteroid Bennu
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has officially arrived at the asteroid Bennu after a more than two-year-long journey. The spacecraft rendezvoused with its target around noon EST, and NASA confirmed the arrival a few minutes thereafter during a live event today.
A portrait of Earth and the Moon from 3 million miles away
Sometimes you need to step back to see the big picture, and if your subjects are 249,000 miles apart, you need to step waaay back. Luckily, the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is moving rapidly away from us and was recently just in the right position, around 3.1 million miles away, so it trained its MapCam instrument towards its former home and captured this poignant portrait of the Earth and the Moon.
NASA dominated space and social media in 2016
"We all have a thirst for wonder," American astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his sci-fi novel Contact. "It's a deeply human quality." And it's partly thanks to this "thirst" that NASA had the space game on lock this year, even though it doesn't have access to as much money as it used to. The agency stepped into 2016 armed with $19.3 billion in government funding. Yes, that's almost a $1 billion more than what the administration originally asked for, but it's also significantly lower than NASA's budget in previous years, when adjusted for inflation.
NASA's asteroid-bound OSIRIS-Rex launches Thursday
After years of construction and months of rigorous testing, NASA's asteroid-sampling OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft is ready to take off from Cape Canaveral this Thursday, September 8th at 7pm ET. After it leaves the atmosphere on an Atlas V rocket, the spacecraft will take two years to reach its destination, a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. Upon arrival in 2018, OSIRIS will begin an multi-year mission of mapping the 1,650-foot asteroid and bringing home a scoop of carbon-rich space rocks, which researchers believe may hold 4.5 billion-year-old leftovers from the beginning of the solar system and some of the basic building blocks of life. Update (9/8): You can watch NASA's livestream of the launch (scheduled for 7:05PM ET) right here or embedded below.
ICYMI: NASA hunts for life hidden in an asteroid
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: NASA is planning a trip to get a sample of the large asteroid Bennu and see if any organic materials can be found on it. If you remember hypercolor t-shirts, you'll want to know about an air pollution sensing shirt that changes color and patterns when carbon monoxide, radioactivity and particle pollutants are detected. You'll want to see this video from Japan showing a volcano's eruption with a thunderstorm inside. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
NASA wants to put your name on a spacecraft headed to an asteroid
Forget those dime-a-dozen "name a star" gifts -- wouldn't you rather put your name on a spacecraft that advances human understanding? NASA certainly thinks you do. It's teaming up with the Planetary Society to etch your name on chips inside its OSIRIS-REx probe, which will head toward the asteroid Bennu in 2016. While it's doubtful that any aliens will read your microscopic claim to fame, it'll certainly get the grand tour. The spacecraft will spend 500 days around the asteroid before heading back, and both the decommissioned vehicle as well as the returning sample capsule will have your ID. You can register your name today for free; just be prepared to wait years for the payoff.
