Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Like the “Peanuts” character Pigpen, the near-Earth asteroid Bennu moves around in a cloud of its own dust.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has watched Bennu spit out plumes of dust 11 times since the spacecraft arrived at the asteroid in December 2018. And some of that dust is caught in orbit around the asteroid, scientists announced March 19 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It’s the first time astronomers have spotted such activity at an asteroid.
“Definitely we did not expect to see this,” said OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “We are probably seeing a new kind of activity at asteroid Bennu.”
While this result has planetary scientists excited, the overall news from Bennu is mixed. OSIRIS-REx’s primary mission is to collect dust from the asteroid in 2020 and bring it back to Earth in 2023, in hopes that the rubbly, water-rich asteroid holds clues to the origin of life in the solar system (SN: 1/19/19, p. 20). But that job may prove tricky. In a series of studies in Nature journals released March 19, the OSIRIS-REx team reports that the space rock is a minefield of boulders much bigger than the craft was designed to navigate.
“It’s not necessarily completely unexpected,” says planetary scientist Daniella DellaGiustina, also of the University of Arizona. “But it does pose a harder challenge than we had planned for.”
OSIRIS-REx arrived at the near-Earth asteroid on December 3, when the rock was about 130…
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