ASTEROID BENNU

Subject : Science and tech

Context : NASA’s OSIRIS-REx  spacecraft briefly touched asteroid Bennu, from where it is meant to collect samples of dust and pebbles and deliver them back to Earth in 2023.

Concept :

• Bennu is a 500-meter wide asteroid in an elliptical orbit around the sun. It is a carbonaceous asteroid composition including a large amount of carbon.
• The asteroid was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey on 1999.It was originally named as 1999 RQ36.

Asteroids :

• Asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the Sun, much smaller than planets. They are also called minor planets.
• Asteroids are divided into three classes. First, those found in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which is estimated to contain somewhere between 1.1-1.9 million asteroids.
• The second group is that of trojans, which are asteroids that share an orbit with a larger planet. NASA reports the presence of Jupiter, Neptune and Mars trojans.
• The third classification is Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA), which have orbits that pass close by the Earth. Those that cross the Earth’s orbit are called Earth-crossers. More than 10,000 asteroids are classified as potentially harmful asteroids.

OSIRIS REx Mission :

• OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) mission aims to study asteroid Bennu, collect a sample and return it to Earth in 2023.
• The mission will spend 2.5 years, mapping its surface and studying its composition.
• In mid-2020, scientists will direct Osiris-Rex to drop down to the asteroid and grab at least 60g of regolith, or “topsoil”
• The OSIRIS-REx mission is not the first to ever visit an asteroid and attempt a sample return — Japan has done (Hayabusa Mission) it before and Europe (Rosetta Mission) has managed to land on a comet.