U.S. Spacecraft Successfully Completes Rubble Retrieval
U.S. Spacecraft Osiris-Rex made contact with an asteroid, the first from the U.S. to do so. It should return with its findings in a few years (photo courtesy AP News).
On Oct. 20, the U.S. did something that they had never done before: gathered rock samples from an asteroid in space. The Osiris-Rex spacecraft reached the asteroid Bennu after a tense four-and-a-half hour orbit. The asteroid is over 200 million miles away from the Earth, so scientists will not know exactly what Osiris-Rex retrieved until 2023.
“We’re going to be looking at a whole series of images as we descended down to the surface, made contact, fired that gas bottle, and I really want to know how that surface responded. We haven’t done this before, so this is new territory for us,” said Dante Lauretta, head scientist and professor at the University of Arizona. Up until this point, Japan had been the only country in the world able to retrieve material from an asteroid that was in motion. The information retrieved from Bennu will be able to help scientists make predictions about the vast mystery that is space.
HI! My name is Taylor Dent, and this is my senior year. This is my second year in SPUB, and my first as Editor-in-Chief. In addition to being part of SPUB,...
