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A very interesting space mission that is at the same time kind of frightening: A NASA spacecraft that recently returned from deep space has been relaunched for a mission to study the "God of Chaos" asteroid as it begins to near Earth's orbit. The agency's spacecraft OSIRIS-REx — now named the OSIRIS-APEX — has been sent off to study the asteroid Apophis' extremely close flyby of Earth in 2029, the likes of which "hasn't happened since the dawn of recorded history," NASA announced. Oh really, an asteroid is making an "extremely close flyby" of our fragile planet in 5ish years?...

oom At 12:37 a.m. EDT (10:37 a.m. MDT), a helicopter gently placed NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample capsule, attached to the end of a 100-foot cable, on the ground outside a hangar on the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. Two technicians on the ground helped guide the capsule down. Once the helicopter line was detached and the helicopter had departed, the clean room team removed the capsule from its metal transport cradle. They loaded the capsule onto a cart and wheeled it into the hangar where a temporary clean room had been set up. In the hangar, the capsule...

Early morning on Sunday, Sept. 24, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s sample capsule will come face-to-face with Earth’s atmosphere for the first time since the mission’s 2016 launch. On board are an estimated 8.8 ounces, or 250 grams, of rocky material collected from the surface of Bennu in 2020 – NASA’s first asteroid sample and the largest ever collected in space. When it approaches Earth, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft won’t slow down as it makes its sample drop-off. Instead, when it reaches 63,000 miles (or 102,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface – about one-third the distance from Earth to the Moon – a message...

When the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft swings by Earth on Sunday, it is expected to deliver a rare cosmic gift: a pristine sample collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will release a capsule containing an estimated 8.8 ounces of asteroid rocks and soil from space toward a landing zone in the Utah desert. NASA will provide a live stream of the sample delivery beginning at 10 a.m. ET Sunday. The capsule is expected to enter Earth’s atmosphere at 10:42 a.m. ET, traveling about 27,650 miles per hour (44,498 kilometers per hour). It will land...

Explanation: The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid 101955 Bennu on October 20, 2020, after a careful approach to the small, near-Earth asteroid's boulder-strewn surface. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to crush some of the rocks in this close-up recorded by the spacecraft's SamCam. The image was snapped just after surface contact some 321 million kilometers from planet Earth. One second later, the spacecraft fired nitrogen gas from a bottle intended to blow a substantial amount of Bennu's regolith into the sampling head, collecting the loose surface material. And...

NASA scientists have predicted there is a chance that a massive asteroid they have been tracking could smash into earth in the year 2182, potentially devastating an area the size of Texas. Bennu, a Near-Earth Object (NEO), orbits the earth roughly every six years and has been on the space agency’s radar since 1999 when it was first discovered. There have been three close encounters involving Bennu in 1999, 2005, and 2011, scientists said. On September 25, 2135, Bennu will make a close fly-by past Earth and has a miniscule chance through a pass through a “gravitational keyhole” that would...

NASA has revealed that while collecting samples from the asteroid Bennu in October of 2020, the spacecraft's sampler arm sank over a foot in the loosely packed surface layer, as if there was no resistance. The spacecraft narrowly avoided being swallowed by firing up its thrusters and moving away from the surface. University of Arizona Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences, Dante Lauretta, revealed that the "particles making up Bennu's exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that they act more like a fluid than a solid." Experts behind the mission likened the experience to jumping into...

Explanation: This is what it looks like to punch an asteroid. Last month, NASA's robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx descended toward, thumped into, and then quickly moved away from the small near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu. The featured video depicts the Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event over a three-hour period. As the movie begins, the automated probe approaches the 500-meter, diamond-shaped, space rock as it rotates noticeably below. About 20 seconds into the video, Nightingale comes into view -- a touchdown area chosen to be relatively flat and devoid of large boulders that could damage the spaceship. At 34 seconds, the shadow of OSIRIS-REx's...

Two days after touching down on asteroid Bennu, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission team received on Thursday, Oct. 22, images that confirm the spacecraft has collected more than enough material to meet one of its main mission requirements -- acquiring at least 2 ounces (60 grams) of the asteroid's surface material.

Make sure to go to the link and click on the hotlink highlighted as "Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event" for a video of the touchdown. A photo sequence is also shown in the last hotlink in the Explanation or by clicking on the image at the link. Explanation: On October 20, after a careful approach to the boulder-strewn surface, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid Bennu. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to crush some of the rocks in this snapshot. The close-up scene was recorded by the spacecraft's SamCam...

Want a little reminder of how amazingly clever we humans can be? Yesterday, from a distance of more than 320 million kilometres (200 million miles) away, NASA scientists piloted a spacecraft to gently touch down on a spinning asteroid, collecting a sample of surface rubble to bring back home to Earth. At 6:08 PM EDT, the signal from spacecraft OSIRIS-REx reached Earth to let us know that it had successfully touched down at the Nightingale collection site on asteroid Bennu, within a metre (three feet) of its target, and safely bounced back up again after just 6 seconds of contact....

Imagine parallel parking a 15-passenger van into just two to three parking spaces surrounded by two-story boulders. On October 20, a University of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years in the making will attempt the astronomical equivalent more than 200 million miles (320 million kilometres) away. A NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx will soon attempt to touch the surface of an asteroid and collect loose rubble. OSIRIS-REx is the United States' first asteroid sample return mission, aiming to collect and carry a pristine, unaltered sample from an asteroid back to Earth for scientific study. The spacecraft will attempt to touch the surface...

In just a few days, NASA is going to bounce its probe OSIRIS-REx off asteroid Bennu. The mission will collect a sample from the asteroid, and return it to Earth for closer study - one of the first missions of its kind. That return sample will help us to understand not just asteroids, but the earliest days of the Solar System's existence. However, that is not the sole mission of OSIRIS-REx. The probe arrived in Bennu orbit in December of 2018, and since that time has been using its suite of instruments to learn as much as it can about...

OSIRIS-REx — an international sample-return mission led by NASA and joined by science team members from Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy, and with an instrument provided through the Canadian Space Agency — is less than one month away from performing a Touch-And-Go sample collection maneuver to return portions of asteroid Bennu to Earth. Meanwhile, science teams have observed regular material shedding activity from the near Earth object — an unexpected find that allows scientists to better understand the dynamic little worlds littered throughout the inner solar system.

The probe has been orbiting the asteroid since 2018 and has been preparing to collect a chunk of asteroid rock, which it will bring back to Earth in 2023. OSIRIS-REx is set to take the sample from the site named Nightingale on Oct. 20, 2020, but on May 26 the spacecraft took a dive toward Osprey, the backup sample collection site for the mission. OSIRIS-REx dropped down to just 820 feet (250 meters) above the site, which is the closest the spacecraft has been to Osprey. During the operation, the probe took 347 images from PolyCam, one of three cameras...

Astronomers have discovered more than 20,000 so-called near-Earth asteroids, or space rocks whose orbits pass within about 30 million miles (50 million kilometers) of Earth's orbit. Whereas comets erupt with long tails of gas, dust and debris when they streak near the sun, the vast majority of near-Earth asteroids appear inert. However, previous research found that a small number of asteroids, such as the asteroid 133P/Elst-Pizarro, could actively erupt with large amounts of dust and bits of rock — enough to create temporary clouds or comet-like tails that are visible from Earth-based telescopes. Much remains unknown about what drives such...

The English tabloid Express ran a story today (Feb. 11) with the headline "NASA warn 'APOCALYPSE asteroid' Bennu WILL appear in the sky this Valentine's Day." The piece claimed that the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid Bennu — "a doomsday asteroid which has a high probability of impacting Earth in one hundred years time" — will be "visible to the naked eye" on the night of Feb. 14, slightly to the right of Mars. This is entirely wrong. First of all, Bennu is not an "apocalypse asteroid," and NASA never labeled it such. (Agency scientists aren't known for their hyperbolic and...

Bennu has a shape that looks a bit like a spinning top. It is roughly 500 meters (1,640 feet) in diameter and orbits the sun once every 1.2 years, or 436.604 days. Every six years or so, it comes very close to Earth — about 0.002 AU, according to the University of Arizona. (... well within the orbit of Earth's moon.) Bennu is part of a small class of carbonaceous (dark) asteroids that likely have primitive materials in them. Called a B-type class, Bennu and other asteroids like it have materials such as volatiles (compounds with a low boiling point),...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched in 2016, but today it will begin to orbit its destination: the asteroid Bennu. When it does, Benniu will break the record for the smallest object ever orbited by a manmade spacecraft. NASA will begin a process of learning more about the small asteroids that reside in our part of the solar system. You can watch the livestream of the arrival here:

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with its targeted asteroid, Bennu, on Monday, December 3, 2018, at approximately 17:00 UTC (noon EST). Translate UTC to your time. NASA will air a live event from 16:45 to 17:15 UTC (11:45 a.m.to 12:15 p.m. EST) to highlight the arrival of the agency’s first asteroid sample return mission. You can watch on NASA TV, Facebook Live, Ustream, YouTube and NASA Live. NASA TV also will air an arrival preview program starting at 16:15 UTC (11:15 a.m. EST). OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) launched in September 2016 and has been...