Four years after launching from Earth, NASA’s Osiris-Rex on Tuesday made a historic and brief landing on potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu, over 200 …
Four years after launching from Earth, NASA’s Osiris-Rex on Tuesday made a historic and brief landing on potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu, over 200 million miles away. The spacecraft traveled all that way to perform a short touch-and-go maneuver with the goal of collecting a sample from the asteroid’s surface and transporting it back to Earth for study. We won’t know until Wednesday whether Osiris-Rex succeeded in grabbing a space science souvenir, but on Tuesday, NASA TV reported the spacecraft’s robotic sampling arm, named Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (Tagsam), successfully touched down on Bennu for about 15 seconds. During the brief contact, it performed what amounts to a cosmic pickpocketing maneuver. The spacecraft, which operates largely autonomously due to the 18-minute communications delay with mission control on Earth, fired a canister of gas through Tagsam that should have disrupted the surface of Bennu enough for a sample to make its way up into the arm’s collector head.
