Nearly two years ago, NASA made history when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly made To collect a sample of the regolith from the surface of the asteroid. While the mission will not return to Earth NASA shares new information regarding the orb. in Posted this week (via ), the agency revealed that OSIRIS-REx would have sunk in Bennu had the spacecraft not immediately launched its thrusters following touching the surface of the asteroid.
“It turns out that the particles that make up the outside of the Bennu are so loosely packed and bound together so lightly that if someone were to step on the Bennu they would feel very little resistance, as if they were stepping into a hole of plastic balls that are popular in children’s areas.” .
This is not what scientists thought they would find in Bennu. When observing the asteroid from Earth, it was expected that its surface was covered with a soft material resembling a sandy beach. Bennu’s reaction to the landing of Osiris Rex also puzzled scientists. After a brief interaction with the asteroid, the spacecraft left a crater 26 feet (8 meters) wide. In lab tests, the capture procedure “barely made a hole.”
After analyzing the data from the spacecraft, they found that it encountered the same amount of resistance as anyone on Earth would feel while depressing the piston in a French pressure coffee pot. “By the time we launched our thrusts to leave the surface, we were still sinking into the asteroid,” said Ron Blose, a scientist on the OSIRIS-REx team.
According to NASA, its findings on Bennu might help scientists better explain distant observations of other asteroids. In turn, this might help the agency design future asteroid missions. “I think we’re still very early in understanding what these bodies are, because they behave in very counter-intuitive ways,” said OSIRIS-REx team member Patrick Michel.
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