![]() Of course, that’s part of the fun of studying asteroids. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “You could imagine maybe in a million years or less the whole thing flying apart,” said Scheeres, a distinguished professor in the Ann and H.J. The asteroid’s core appears to be weaker than its exterior, a fact that could put its survival at risk in the not-too-distant future. What the team has found may also spell trouble for Bennu. “If you can measure the gravity field with enough precision, that places hard constraints on where the mass is located, even if you can’t see it directly,” said Andrew French, a coauthor of the new study and a former graduate student at CU Boulder, now at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL). Think of it like taking an X-ray of a chunk of space debris with an average width about the height of the Empire State Building. Using OSIRIS-REx’s own navigational instruments and other tools, the group spent nearly two years mapping out the ebbs and flows of Bennu’s gravity field. Scheeres, McMahon and their colleagues on the mission’s radio science team now think that they have an answer-or at least part of one. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin So far, however, one question has remained elusive: What’s Bennu like on the inside?ĭiagram of the orbit of Bennu in relation to Earth and other planets. Since then, the spacecraft, built by Colorado-based Lockheed Martin, has studied the object in more detail than any other asteroid in the history of space exploration. OSIRIS-REx rendezvoused with Bennu, an asteroid orbiting the sun more than 200 million miles from Earth, in late 2018. The findings could give scientists new insights into the evolution of the solar system’s asteroids-how bodies like Bennu transform over millions of years or more. ![]() ![]() The results appear in a study published in the journal Science Advances and led by the University of Colorado Boulder’s OSIRIS-REx team, including professors Daniel Scheeres and Jay McMahon. New findings from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission suggest that the interior of the asteroid Bennu could be weaker and less dense than its outer layers-like a crème-filled chocolate egg flying though space. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Arizona The spacecraft’s Pol圜am camera obtained the thirty-six 2.2-millisecond frames over a period of four hours and 18 minutes. This series of images taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows Bennu in one full rotation from a distance of around 50 miles (80 km).
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