NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has spotted the armored asteroid 101955 Bennu, which is said to reveal the secret behind the birth of our solar system.
It has been nearly six years since NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made its first flight toward a very special target. Unlike most NASA missions, the target is neither a planet nor the moon, but a 450-meter-wide asteroid known as 101955 Bennu. The goal of this unusual mission is to collect at least 60 grams of a sample of this asteroid and return it to Earth. why? Because scientists believe that this asteroid could be the key to unlocking our solar system’s past. While the spacecraft won’t reach Earth until 2023, it has revealed something even more interesting about the asteroid Bennu. This ancient asteroid also seems to be covered in a protective shield. Read on to find out more. Also read: NASA and the European Space Agency are discussing sending the first Europeans to the moon
The OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) spacecraft was launched on September 8, 2016. In September 2017, it flew over Earth and in 2018, finally arrived at Bennu. After spending about two years analyzing the surface to find a suitable place to extract the sample, I ended up collecting between 400g to 1kg of the sample. Since then, he has observed various other features of this asteroid and made some amazing discoveries.
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NASA OSIRIS-REx finds strange shield on asteroid Bennu
During routine observations, NASA astronomers try to calculate the age of the asteroid because one of the main reasons behind this mission is that the asteroid is considered too primitive. While the sample was not tested, its age cannot be precisely determined, scientists found a unique way of figuring out the age of celestial bodies and orbits around their impact craters.
Planetary scientists can estimate the age of the surface by measuring the abundance and size of craters. NASA explains in Surat. “Also, the size of the crater depends on the size of the tumpeng, with larger impacts generally creating larger craters. Because small meteorites are much more numerous than large meteorites, celestial bodies such as asteroids usually contain more small craters than large ones. “
However, when observing Bennu, this pattern didn’t make sense for the smaller holes. Scientists noticed that craters less than 2-3 meters in size decreased in number as they got smaller. This unusual behavior initially confused NASA researchers because it meant the asteroid was smaller than they thought.
But upon further study of the asteroid, they discovered that it was made up of much larger asteroid debris and was simply a giant “debris pile”. Now, scientists believe that the presence of these tiny rocks has prevented the formation of craters from smaller meteorites.
“The displacement or disturbance of an individual or small group of rock by a small impact is probably one of the most rapid processes on the asteroid’s surface from debris,” said Edward (Bow) Beerhouse of Lockheed Martin Space, lead author of the book. paper About Umar Bino.
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