Saturday, December 14, 2019

Landing site on Bennu chosen


After finding out that asteroid Bennu is basically a roughly cubical mass of boulders, NASA has taken a considerably long time figuring out where they're going to attempt to touch down and grab a piece of the rocks.  Ha.  They just announced where OSIRIS-REx is going to take its best shot.

It's not going to be easy;  they wanted a 50-meter diameter area, but they had to settle for 16 meters.  The name of the top target is Nightingale, with a backup site named Osprey.  (If there was ever a target area named Mockingbird, apparently they killed that plan.)

NASA asteroid hunter chooses landing site on boulder-strewn space rock

See? I told you -- boulders, boulders everywhere.

Here's another article about this plan:

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx must avoid ‘Mount Doom’ to return a sample of the asteroid Bennu

I grabbed this pic of Nightingale from that article.  It shows the size of OSIRIS-REx compared to the size of the landing area.




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