First NASA Osiris-Rex Images Show Incredible Touchdown on Asteroid Bennu
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus:
First NASA Osiris-Rex images show incredible touchdown on asteroid Bennu:
NASA's asteroid-chaser, Osiris-Rex, completed a brief and historic landing on the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu, over 200 million miles away on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the space agency revealed the first batch of images from the daring operation, revealing a delicate-yet-explosive moment between rock and robot.
Osiris-Rex traveled all that way to perform a short touch-and-go maneuver. Its major goal is to collect a sample from the asteroid's surface and transport it back to Earth for study.
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.
[...] The spacecraft, which operates largely autonomously due to the 18-minute communications delay with mission control on Earth, fired a canister of gas through Tagsam that disrupted the surface of Bennu and should have enabled a sample to make its way up into the arm's collector head.
[...] Around 24 hours after the operation, NASA shared the first images of the touchdown operation captured by the spacecraft. The Tagsam moves into position and its sampling head makes contact with Bennu's surface before the explosive burst of nitrogen is fired. The operation kicks up a ton of debris, which flies around the acquisition arm. It's really something!
The sample collection took longer than it seemed to take in the video.
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