Streak shotgun with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid probe as it buzzes Bennu (video)

Are making an try to stare what issues are admire on a home rock tens of hundreds of thousands of miles a long way off from Earth? NASA has you covered.

Correct now, the shut to-Earth asteroid Bennu is ready 180 million miles (290 million kilometers) away, and with it is a NASA spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx. The probe will strive a complicated goal this autumn: snatching a share of home rock to bring home to Earth.

So before the gigantic day, OSIRIS-REx is working in direction of its strikes — and the resulting footage is completely as cool as you would anticipate from a share of equipment that flew honest 130 feet (40 meters) above a rubble-covered home rock, in step with a assertion. That high is the equivalent of standing on the roof of an 11-epic building and taking a eye down.

Associated: OSIRIS-REx: NASA’s asteroid sample-return mission in photos

But in station of toy vehicles and ant-admire individuals, the digicam onboard OSIRIS-REx seen finest rocks: gigantic rocks and tiny rocks, animated rocks and rounded rocks, unlit rocks and light rocks. Rocks to this point as the mechanical take into yarn can explore.

These rocks surround what scientists on the OSIRIS-REx mission compile nicknamed the Nightingale sampling situation, inner a crater on the 1,640-foot-extensive (500 m) Bennu’s northern hemisphere. On Oct. 20, OSIRIS-REx will fabricate a a similar descent but lag 130 feet farther, in a position to maintain a memento from amongst these rocks.

That sample will land right here on Earth in September 2023, if all goes in step with notion. Scientists will then watch the asteroid rubble for clues referring to the record voltaic machine’s history and the role that carbon-rich home rocks admire Bennu would possibly probably possibly compile played in the upward thrust of existence on Earth.

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