Tagging Bennu

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s arm reached out and touched asteroid 101955 Bennu on October 20, 2020, after a careful formulation to the shrimp, come-Earth asteroid’s boulder-strewn surface. Dubbed a Contact-And-Dawdle (TAG) sampling match, the 30 centimeter huge sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to be like to crush among the essential rocks in this finish-up recorded by the spacecraft’s SamCam. The image turned into as soon as snapped valid after surface contact some 321 million kilometers from planet Earth. One second later, the spacecraft fired nitrogen gasoline from a bottle supposed to blow a gigantic amount of Bennu’s regolith into the sampling head, gathering the free surface fabric. And now, finish to three years later, on Sunday, September 24, that sample of asteroid Bennu is scheduled to reach on planet Earth. The sample return tablet will seemingly be dropped off by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft because it makes a finish flyby of Earth. Twenty minutes after the tumble-off, the spacecraft will fire its thrusters to divert past Earth and proceed on to orbit come-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis.