NASA spacecraft's historic landing on asteroid Bennu

NASA has successfully completed its historic landing on the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.

Images taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft show its ‘Touch-and-Go’ (TAG) arm that touched and took samples from the boulder-studded asteroid, located more than 200 million miles from Earth. It’s the first time an American mission has taken samples from an asteroid (only Japan had done so before).

Launched in 2016, the OSIRIS REx orbited Bennu for nearly two years after reaching it in December 2018. The spacecraft's cameras discovered the asteroid was covered in building-size boulders held together by gravity and not the sandy beach-style surface the mission team was expecting. They also discovered it was actively ejecting little rocks, pebbles and particles into space.

This meant NASA had to shrink the landing site to one-tenth of its original size. Imagine a 15-seater van whizzing through space and approaching a rock shaped like a spinning top, as tall as the Empire State Building AND which is rapidly rotating. That’s basically what happened during the TAG mission.

Despite a near-20-minute communication delay between the OSIRIS REx and Earth, the craft worked autonomously using its advanced navigation system to land approximately three feet from the targeted location.
The samples from the ‘rubble pile’ asteroid will be returned to Earth in 2023.

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