After a two-year chase, a Nasa probe has reached the ancient asteroid Bennu. The SRC is designed to hold a sample of rocks and dust from Bennu during the spacecraft’s return to Earth. Mar. Explanation: Where is the best place to collect a surface sample from asteroid Bennu? Date Taken: Dec. 11, 2019. OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, is scheduled to make its preliminary sample collection attempt in August 2020 and will return to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023. The robotic explorer Osiris-Rex pulled within 12 miles (19km) of the diamond-shaped object on Monday and will go …

Bennu Particle Ejection Event – Jan. 19, 2019. 2019 December 23 Places for OSIRIS-REx to Touch Asteroid Bennu Video Credit: NASA, GSFC, U. Arizona, SVS, OSIRIS-REx. 101955 Bennu (provisional designation 1999 RQ 36) [11] is a carbonaceous asteroid in the Apollo group discovered by the LINEAR Project on 11 September 1999. Asteroid Bennu Particles This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on Jan. 6, 2019, was created by combining two images taken by the NavCam 1 imager aboard NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: a short exposure image, which shows the asteroid clearly, and a long-exposure image (five seconds), which shows the particles clearly. It likely formed in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and has drifted much closer to Earth since then. It is a potentially hazardous object that is listed on the Sentry Risk Table with the second-highest cumulative rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale. At Bennu, NASA finds a mysterious, boulder-strewn asteroid Overall, the asteroid is very dark, but it has some distinctly brighter areas. Eric Berger - Mar 19, 2019 5:30 pm UTC 19, 2019 — Astronomers have discovered evidence of abundant water-bearing minerals on the surface of the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu.

This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on January 19 was created by combining two images taken by the NavCam 1 imager onboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: a short exposure image (1.4 ms), which shows the asteroid clearly, and a long exposure image (5 sec), which shows the particles clearly.

Bennu likely was broken off from a much larger carbon-rich asteroid about 700 million to 2 billion years ago, which is relatively recent in geological time.