WASHINGTON D.C. — NASA has shared new images of asteroid Bennu taken by its OSIRIS-REx space probe.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx satellite has taken new photos of Bennu, the 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid that some scientists believe could give us clues to the origins of life.
OSIRIS-REx is on a sample-return mission. Its main goal is to collect a sample of Bennu's soil and return it to Earth for analysis.
On January 22, NASA shared new imagery of the asteroid's southern hemisphere. They captured these photos using the space probe's NavCam imager. This technology not only allows OSIRIS-REx to snap photos of the space rock but also monitors its path around it.
At around 500-meters wide, Bennu is thought to be the smallest space object ever to be orbited by a manmade satellite. So far OSIRIS-REx has already completed 10 orbits around the asteroid. It takes the probe roughly 62 hours to complete one orbit at a speed of 5 centimeters per second.
As the space probe circles around Bennu, the mission team uses the collected data to select a location for a sample collection in July 2020.
According to OSIRIS-REx's Twitter account, the spacecraft is more than 95 million kilometers away from Earth. At that distance, it takes the probe over ten minutes to send and then receive communications with its control team at NASA.
The asteroid has been in the space agency's sights since it was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research survey on September 11, 1999.
The asteroid comes close to Earth every six years. NASA estimates there is a one in 2,700 chance of it hitting our planet in the next century.
