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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