CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) – A NASA spacecraft left a mess on an asteroid when it caught a load of debris last year to return to Earth, new images revealed Thursday.
The Osiris-Rex spacecraft made one last flight of the asteroid Bennu on April 7 to take pictures of the disturbances left by the October sample collection.
A depression is visible where Osiris-Rex has penetrated the asteroid’s surface. The boulders were thrown by the pressurized nitrogen gas that was drawn into the ground to pour the suction material and by the spacecraft’s propeller. A 1-ton boulder was thrown at about 12 meters.
The Osiris-Rex team meticulously planned the last flight to ensure the best photos. The pictures were taken around noon to avoid the shadows and to see better the changes on the rocky surface of Bennu.
“These observations were not in the original plan of the mission, so we were pleased to return and document what we did,” Dathon Golish of the University of Arizona said in a statement.
Osiris-Rex will leave Bennu’s neighborhood next month and return to Earth with its precious 1-kilogram sample cargo. It must arrive in 2023.
The carbon-rich orbiting solar asteroid is 293 million kilometers from Earth. By studying pieces of it, scientists hope to better understand how the planets of our solar system formed and how humans should react if an asteroid endangers Earth.
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