NASA is primed to provide a U.S.-led multinational research team with an intimate near Earth object (NEO) encounter in the hopes of information that a decade ago would have seemed more sci-fi than scientific. Over a seven-year roundtrip to the asteroid Bennu, the Osiris-REx spaceraft is to carry out a lengthy orbital reconnaissance prior to a novel touch-and-go soil-sample collection session, while at the same time conducting a long-term assessment of the subtle non-gravitational forces that influence the course of thousands of NEOs that could pose an impact threat to Earth—ideally supplying information for a kind of detect-and-deflect primer.
Bennu, measuring 575 meters (1,186 ft.) across, orbits the Sun every 1.2 years. An early candidate destination for the robotic phase of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, Bennu skirts near to Earth every six years.
While promising to deliver planetary scientists with the first sizeable pristine samples of the carbon-rich surface material left over from the formation of the Solar System’s inner planets—that perhaps delivered water and the building blocks of life as well—Osiris will furnish the planetary protection community with a preview of an object believed to have a relatively high probability—one in 1,800—of impacting the Earth in 2182.
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