The vessel Osiris-Rex landed for a few seconds on the asteroid Bennu, which is 330 million kilometers away and is full of large rocks. The asteroid has a radius of about 250 meters.
The landing was confirmed by Nasa at 00.12 Norwegian time, about 18 minutes after it actually happened. The reason is that it took so long to send the signal from the spacecraft and back to Earth.
The goal of the short landing is to collect dust and rocks from the ground and return the small pieces of the asteroid back to Earth. It was the first time the United States managed it, and only Japan has previously managed to collect samples from an asteroid.
– I can not believe that we actually managed it, says chief scientist Dante Lauretta at the University of Arizona and adds that the spacecraft did exactly as it should.
The Osiris-Rex spacecraft is the size of a van and made the landing on an area about the size of a tennis court in the crater Nightingale.
Within seconds, an arm of the vessel tried to suck up dust and rocks from the surface. It can take weeks before the researchers know how much, if anything, was collected or if a new attempt must be made.
The collected samples can be back on earth in 2023 at the earliest.
(© NTB)
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