NASA's OSIRIS-REx
NASA to Capture Rich Carbon-Dust from a Former Water World On October 20 th , after several years of patient study of its cryptic target, NASA’s 800$ million spacecraft named OSIRIS- REx ( short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) is finally ready to take a flight to the near-Earth asteroid ‘Bennu’ and sweep some dust and pebbles along. The encounter which is about 334 kilometers away from Earth is going to last for about 10 seconds. Source: NASA If this mission turns out to be successful, NASA can get up to 1 kg of carbon-rich materials by the time of its return to Earth in 2023. Since OSIRIS-REx’s return in 2018, Bennu has shown a lot of changes, and some of them are quite surprising. The 500-meter-wide asteroid was not smooth, as expected, but scattered with more than 200 large boulders that could upset the sampling maneuver. And often, the asteroid even ejects coin-sized pebbles which are probably driven by meteoroid im...