![]() Now NASA has collected an actual sample of its surface that scientists will be able to study. Since the spacecraft arrived at Bennu in 2018, scientists have been characterizing the asteroid's composition from orbit and comparing it to other asteroids and meteorites. ![]() Ron Ballouz (a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona), and colleagues brought together an understanding of the number of craters, the strength of the materials impacted, and the numbers of impactors to help constrain the chronology of Bennu's existence in the inner Solar System at 1.75 million years. Team members from the University of Arizona developed a mathematical formula that allows researchers to calculate the maximum impact energy a boulder of a given size and strength could endure before being smashed. Scientists use studies of impact craters to determine the ages of planetary surfaces. Boulders are scattered across its heavily cratered surface, indicating that it has had a rough-and-tumble life since being liberated from its much larger parent asteroid millions or even billions of years ago. "The craters that we could observe and measure on the surfaces of boulders allowed us to estimate their strengths, a first-of-its-kind measurement."īennu is a dark rubble pile held together by gravity and thought to be an asteroid remnant created following a collision involving a larger main-belt object. Kevin Walsh, a coauthor of "Bennu's near-Earth lifetime of 1.75 million years inferred from craters on its boulders," published October 26 in the journal Nature. "The amazing data collected by OSIRIS-REx at asteroid Bennu have allowed us to not just find impact craters across its surface, but to actually find and study the craters on the surfaces of boulders," said SwRI's Dr. This provides insights into all the processes that might have affected the nature of the sample. While the collected sample will yield enormous scientific value when it is returned to Earth in 2023, a key job for scientists during the time in orbit at Bennu was to understand the geology of the entire asteroid to provide important context for the sample. Using orbital data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, researchers measured centimeter- to meter-sized craters on the boulders scattered around its rugged surface to shed light on the age of the asteroid. ![]() ![]() 10, 2020 - Last week NASA snagged a sample from the surface of asteroid Bennu, an Empire State Building-sized body that Southwest Research Institute scientists have helped map with nearly unprecedented precision. ![]()
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