NASA scientists have made what they describe as an “astonishing” discovery about Bennu, the asteroid from which its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample of rock and dust in 2020.
As the video below shows, the spacecraft landed on the asteroid before causing an explosion to enable it to gather material. Nine seconds after making contact, the spacecraft fired its thrusters to push it away from the rock below, but NASA said if it hadn’t done so it “would have sunk into Bennu.” To work out the density of the asteroid’s surface, scientists analyzed spacecraft acceleration data and images captured during the touchdown process, and then ran hundreds of computer simulations until all of the data matched up.
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