The capsule contains about 250 grams of rock material collected from the surface of the asteroid Bennu in 2020
This small central dot is the spacecraft’s first image OSIRIS REx out of NASA that approaches Earth with samples of the Asteroid Bennu after a journey of almost three years.
On Sunday, September 24, the mission will drop its rock sample to traverse Earth’s atmosphere and land safely at a military field in Utah before continuing your studies Asteroid Apophis.
The pristine material from asteroid Bennu will help shed light on the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago and perhaps even the origins of life on Earth. The capsule contains about 250 grams of rock material collected from the surface of the asteroid Bennu in 2020.
OSIRIS-REx was observed on September 16 by ESA’s Optical Ground Station (OGS) telescope in Tenerife and was located 4.66 million kilometers from Earth. It travels at 23,000 kilometers per hour.
This picture is a combination of 90 individual images, each with a 36-second exposure. They were combined to take into account the motion of the spacecraft, which does not move in a straight line, causing the seemingly stretched background stars to bend and deform, ESA reports.
He OGS telescope ESA’s 1-meter probe was originally built to observe space debris in orbit and test laser communications technologies. Since then, she has expanded her horizons to conduct surveys and follow-up observations of near-Earth asteroids, as well as night-time astronomical observations, even discovering dozens of smaller asteroid planets.
