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Piece of Asteroid Heading for Earth in a Spacecraft, Because They Do That Now

You know you’re living through some exciting times when you get news of a piece of an asteroid heading your way, not as it usually does, hurtling uncontrollably through space, but by hitching a ride inside a spacecraft.
Asteroid Bennu is once again alone in the solar system after OSIRIS-REx left 1 photo
Photo: NASA
If you have been watching what’s going on in space these days, then you are aware that somewhere out there, humanity has a small spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer). Having departed our planet in 2016, it headed straight for an asteroid moving aimlessly millions of miles away from Earth.

Bennu is how the asteroid is called and was deemed ripe for plucking by NASA. The agency sent OSIRIS over there to pinch the asteroid and take a small sample of it to bring home for our brightest minds to study and hopefully unlock some of the mysteries of our solar system.

And pluck it did, as OSIRIS successfully completed its mission, managing to take and store inside it a candy bar-heavy piece of the asteroid, 60 grams or so of regolith that may or may not change our understanding of the Universe.

On May 10, the spaceship finally began its long trip home. It departed the vicinity of the asteroid and will now be heading for Earth on a 1.4 billion mile (2.25 billion km) journey that will see it circle the sun twice. OSIRIS is scheduled to reach Earth orbit in 2023, at which time the capsule containing the asteroid piece will be jettisoned and land sometime in September of the same year.

The goal of the people who will be studying the piece of space rock is to understand better how our solar system was formed. The 60 grams will be split and sent on their merry ways to laboratories worldwide.

As for Bennu, it will continue to roam the solar system alone, one piece of it missing, with a 1-in-2,700 chance of coming to Earth on its own and impacting it sometime after the year 2175.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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