[C19fan]

Bennu has a diameter of almost 500 meters or 1,600 feet. It weighs 60,000,000,000 kg or 132,277,357,310 lbs. /joke on/I hope the gravity of the spacecraft does not jar Bennu's orbit sending it crashing to Earth./joke off/

[Flick Lives]

Instead, OSIRIS-REx will perform something of a drive-by sample collection. The spacecraft will only touch the surface with its sample collection arm for a few seconds, hoovering up some rock samples before taking off again. This is something no one has ever done before, so it’ll be exciting to see how it works.

Sounds like a tricky trajectory to do a touch-and-go on an asteroid.

[Secret Agent Man]

For relative weight reference, it weights a tad more than 66 us Nomitz-class aircraft carriers, that clock in at about 100,000 tons apiece, or 2 billion pounds.

[dragnet2]

Final Approach to Bennu

This set of images shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s view of Bennu during the final phase of its journey to the asteroid. From Aug. 17 through Nov. 27 the spacecraft’s PolyCam camera imaged Bennu almost daily as the spacecraft traveled 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km) toward the asteroid. The final images were obtained from a distance of around 40 miles (65 km). During this period, OSIRIS-REx completed four maneuvers slowing the spacecraft’s velocity from approximately 1,100 mph (491 m/sec) to 0.10 mph (0.04 m/sec) relative to Bennu, which resulted in the slower approach speed at the end of the video. Date Taken: Aug. 17 to Nov. 27, 2018

[fieldmarshaldj]

*ping*