Too bad Pelosi and Schumer didn’t make the trip.
Did Mike Rowe have a crew standing by to do the filming?
NOVA covered it about 3 hours later.
To quote Lee Greenwood:
I’m proud to be an American.
[earworm]
Ping.
The entire sequence that loop was extracted from can be viewed here:
https://www.asteroidmission.org/
Bear in mind this happened 200 million miles away, which means it takes 18 minutes for radio signals to travel one way. Everything was done under autonomous control by the spacecraft that has been mapping the asteroids surface and creating a Hazard Map since 2018. The actual TAG (touch and go) sample collection occurred in less than 10 seconds as the “reverse vacuum cleaner” contacted the surface.
A great accomplishment by NASA and Lockheed Martin, along with the University of Arizona.
You can download the hi res gif file also. I stepped through it frame by frame, but it will be a couple of days until they perform a moment of inertia experiment to determine how much sample was acquired. It’s possible to make up to two additional attempts if necessary.
Cool.
I still want some gold, platinum and dilythum crystals.
5.56mm
The surface of Bennu looks like the pile of residue left when they broke up the asphalt street in front of my house in preparation for resurfacing it a few years ago. I had heard that the color of the moon was actually about the same color one tone of asphalt. This confirms it.
Now, the lander has to take off and return to Earth. But will the small push it gives the asteroid while leaving affect Bennu’s orbit? Might it redirect the asteroid to a collision course with Earth? Unintended consequences!
But, if it does so, it proves that hazardous asteroids can be easily redirected if they threaten Earth and are discovered in time.
It is my understanding that one of the questions they want answered is whether these asteroids are rubble left over the the solar system’s creation or pieces of a planet, as their orbit is where a planet should be (Bode’s law). The problem is there isn’t enough debris to make up a plant.
I thought Sitchin might have had the answer with his “moon of Niburu colliding with earth and tearing out a chunk, where the Pacific Ocean is now.”
IMO, if the samples turn out to be residue of a planet, it’s back to the drawing board.