‘Literally, We Crushed It’: Video Shows NASA’s OSIRIS-REX Mission Touch Asteroid Bennu

[JacksinPA]

‘Literally, We Crushed It’: Video Shows NASA Space Probe Touch an Asteroid

The spacecraft succeeded in pogo-sticking off the space rock, hinting that it may have been able to capture a large sample to bring back to Earth.

www.nytimes.com

The spacecraft succeeded in pogo-sticking off the space rock, hinting that it may have been able to capture a large sample to bring back to Earth.

When NASA’s OSIRIS-REX spacecraft touched the surface of an asteroid on Tuesday to gather a sample of rocks and dirt, the operation proceeded smoothly, to the glee of the mission’s operators 200 million miles away on Earth.

But the biggest question remained unanswered: How much of the asteroid did OSIRIS-REX pick up? Did it manage to gather any samples at all?

On Wednesday, the mission managers released a video of the sampling mechanism hitting the surface of the asteroid, within three feet or so of where the spacecraft had been aimed.
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“I must have watched about a hundred times last night,” Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the mission, said during a news conference on Wednesday.

Gathering information about asteroids may help us deflect them from hitting our planet in the future.

 

[Deuce]

Also, it's pretty damned cool

 

[Bullseye]

Saw this earlier on the news. What an amazing achievement.