Sunday, April 19, 2020

Bennu's version of the Apollo 10 mission


Back in the Apollo days, Apollo 10 made a test run for the moon landing;  it went to the moon, deployed the Lunar Excursion Model, had the LEM descend to near the lunar surface, then it returned to the rendesvous with the Command Module and headed home to Earth.   The crew members were Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan.   Both Young and Cernan landed on the Moon on Apollo 16 and Apollo 17, respectively.

But that's not the point. The point of this post is that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made a test run for the sample collection landing on asteroid Bennu on April 14, coming within approximately 250 feet of the surface.

Here's a description of what it did:

One Step Closer to Touching Asteroid Bennu

And:
This link features a video of the approach-and-retreat maneuver. 

NASA and Bennu will have to wait for the OSIRIS-REx landing and sample collection attempt, the first of which is scheduled to take place on August 25.  As the saying goes, "We got a bunch of guys about to turn blue ... "


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