Enlarge / Scientists created this mosaic of asteroid Bennu utilizing imagery collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The asteroid spans about 1,600 ft (500 meters) throughout.
A NASA spacecraft will full a round-trip journey to an asteroid this weekend, returning to Earth after a seven-year voyage to deliver again unspoiled rock specimens from an alien world that would yield insights into the formation of life.
The touchdown Sunday at 8:55 am native time in Utah (10:55 am EDT or 14:55 UTC) will wrap up a round-trip journey of 4.Four billion miles (7.1 billion kilometers) for NASA’s robotic OSIRIS-REx mission. The return will set into movement one other sequence of tightly-choreographed occasions to safe the asteroid pattern capsule, fly it midway throughout the nation to a NASA facility on the Johnson House Heart in Houston, then open it as much as reveal the bounty inside.
“The spacecraft trajectory and efficiency have simply been spot on,” mentioned Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx’s program supervisor at Lockheed Martin, which constructed and operates the spacecraft on behalf of NASA. “We have now only a few remaining steps earlier than we now have Bennu samples on the bottom.”
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