Two years after launching from Florida, a NASA spacecraft is closing in on asteroid Bennu to collect a sample of space dust.
The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has even snapped its first, blurry photograph of the cosmic body, which is about the size of a small mountain, about 500m in diameter.
The spacecraft is designed to circle Bennu, and reach out with a robotic arm to “high-five” its surface, then return the sample it collects to Earth in 2023.
The first images of Bennu were taken on Aug. 17 at a distance of 2.3 million kilometers from the US$800 million spacecraft.
“This is the closest we have even been to Bennu,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona.
“This is significant in that we are now in the vicinity of the asteroid, closer than we have ever been even during the close approaches of the asteroid to the Earth,” Lauretta said.
Bennu was chosen from about 500,000 asteroids in the solar system, because it orbits close to Earth’s path around the sun, it is the right size for scientific study, and is one of the oldest asteroids, NASA said.
Astronomers say it poses a slight risk — a one in 2,700 chance — of colliding with Earth in 2135.
The OSIRIS-REx mission is not the first to ever visit an asteroid and attempt a sample return — Japan has done it before and Europe has landed on a comet.
However, it is the first asteroid-sample-return mission for NASA, and it aims to bring back the biggest sample ever, about 60g.
The US men who walked on the moon during the Apollo era of the 1960s and 1970s collected and carried back to Earth 382kg of moon rocks.
In December, OSIRIS-REx is to begin a detailed survey of the asteroid’s surface, which NASA has defined as “arrival” at the asteroid.
Orbital insertion is expected on Dec. 31.
The sample is to be collected in July 2020.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of