a NASA probe established a new milestone Monday in exploration cosmic entering into orbit around an asteroid, Bennu, the smallest in being surrounded by a spaceship object. The probe, called OSIRIS-REx, is the first U.S. Mission in being designed to visit an asteroid and return a sample of your dust to Earth. The 800 million unmanned spacecraft was launched two years ago from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and reached its destination, about 110 million kilometers away on 3 December.
NASA on Monday, after carefully studying the asteroid for several weeks, the spacecraft fired its thrusters to Bennu orbit at 2:43 pm (19 H 43 GMT). The asteroid measures about 500 meters in diameter.
“Entering orbit around Bennu is an incredible achievement that our team has been planning for years,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.
NASA said that the orbit marks “a leap for mankind” because no spaceship “circulated as close to a small space object, one with just enough gravity to keep a vehicle in a stable orbit”. The spacecraft is orbiting at Bennu about a mile from its Center. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft orbited a comet in may 2016, but at one distance of about four miles from the center of the comet 67 p/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Bennu has a force of gravity of only five millionth as strong as the Earth, said NASA.
each orbit of OSIRIS-REx takes 62 hours. The plan is that OSIRIS-REx orbite Bennu until mid-February, using a set of five scientific instruments to map the asteroid in high resolution to help scientists decide precisely where to perform sampling. Then, in 2020, it will reach with its robotic arm and will touch the asteroid in a maneuver that Rich Kuhns, the program manager OSIRIS-REx with Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, described as a “delicate high-five (clash of hands)”.
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