Asteroid Bennu has been floating undisturbed through space for billions of years, but this will change this night. Then a NASA spacecraft lands on the boulder. The purpose of the super-short visit to Bennu is to take grit from the surface back to earth. That raw material can tell us more about the origin of the earth.
Scientists calculated that Bennu originated in the first ten million years of our solar system, more than 4.5 billion years ago. Because it has been floating around quite undisturbed all this time, it can tell us a lot about that time, is the expectation.
“NASA is going to Bennu because he’s relatively close at 333 million kilometers away, so it’s easily accessible,” says Lucas Ellerbroek, astronomer from the University of Amsterdam, in the Radio 1 Journal. “It’s also big enough to be interesting. There is enough rock on it to study. We hope it contains the same material that was present here on Earth when the planet was formed.”
The Earth was formed from boulders similar to Bennu, which have clumped together over time. There are tens of thousands of boulders like Bennu floating around in space.
Like an eagle
NASA launched the space probe that will investigate the asteroid in 2016. It arrived at the planet in 2018 and has since hovered a few hundred meters around Bennu. During that period he mapped the surface of the rock.
“Now we know that it is strewn with boulders the size of cows. So that will be quite a challenge to be able to land there”, says Ellerbroek. “You have to imagine yourself floating around in a crowded parking lot trying to find a place.” Ultimately, the landing will be very short. The space probe descends like a kind of eagle. It then lands on the Bennu for 16 seconds to grab a small handful of gravel, then flies away again.
NASA has studied Bennu well in recent years. This is what the space agency now knows about the asteroid:
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