23
Oct
OSIRIS-REx and asteroid Bennu
OSIRIS-REx and asteroid Bennu:
Science & Technology | Mains Paper-III
On October 20th, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly touched asteroid Bennu, from where it is meant to collect samples of dust and pebbles and deliver them back to Earth in 2023.
Asteroid Bennu
- The asteroid was named after an Egyptian deity by a nine-year-old boy from North Carolina in 2013 who won NASA’s “Name that Asteroid” competition.
- The asteroid was discovered by a team from the NASA-funded Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research team in 1999.
- Bennu is an asteroid located at a distance of about 200 million miles away from the Earth.
Asteroids
- Asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the Sun, much smaller than planets.
- They are also called minor planets.
Asteroids are divided into three classes.
- First, those found in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which are estimated to contain somewhere between 1.1-1.9 million asteroids.
- The second group is that of trojans, which are asteroids that share an orbit with a larger planet.
- The third classification is Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA), which have orbits that pass close by the Earth. Those that cross the Earth’s orbit are called Earth-crossers.
- Over 1,400 NEA are classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs).
What is the OSIRIS-REx mission?
- OSIRIS-Rex stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.
- This is NASA’s first mission meant to return a sample from the ancient asteroid.
- Launched in 2016, it reached its target in 2018.
- The departure window for the mission will open up in 2021, after which it will take over two years to reach back to Earth.
Significance of studying asteroid Bennu:
- Relatively close to the Earth: Bennu is an asteroid about as tall as the Empire State Building and located at a distance of about 200 million miles away from the Earth.
- Information about the formation and history of planets and the sun: Bennu hasn’t undergone drastic changes since its formation over billions of years ago and therefore it contains chemicals and rocks dating back to the birth of the solar system.
- To check if the asteroid might be potentially hazardous.
What do we know about the asteroid so far?
- A B-type asteroid: Implying that it contains significant amounts of carbon and various other minerals.
- Age of the asteroid: Scientists believe that it was formed in the first 10 million years of the solar system’s formation, implying that it is roughly 4.5 billion years old.
- A Near-Earth Object (NEO): That might strike the Earth in the next century, between the years 2175 and 2199. NEOs are comets and asteroids nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits which allows them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.
For Prelims: Asteroids, Bennu
For Mains: NASA’s feat of landing on an asteroid
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