11 day old moon
84.9 percent lit
September 29, 2017
By Ben Burress
On September 22, (click here) a spaceship visited Earth—NASA can confirm that it wasn’t alien property. It was NASA’s own OSIRIS-REx probe, swinging by Earth in a gravitational “slingshot” maneuver designed to fling it toward a 2018 rendezvous with an asteroid named Bennu.
The spacecraft will become NASA’s first mission ever to visit an asteroid, collect samples of its ancient materials, and return them to Earth for laboratory analysis.
More than merely an asteroid-dust collector, however, this mission aims to give scientists a clearer understanding of the formation of the solar system, the Earth, and the origin of life on our planet.
Launched on September 8, 2016, OSIRIS-REx —which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer—will arrive at Bennu in August 2018, where it will map the asteroid’s surface in detail, and then graze to within a few meters of its surface to collect dust samples. It will then head back to Earth for an expected return in 2023....
