NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Completes Final Tour of Asteroid Bennu Before Its 180,000,000 Mile Trip Back to Earth - SciTechDaily

By Rani Gran, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

This artist’s concept shows the planned flight path of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft during its final flyby of asteroid Bennu, which is scheduled for April 7.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx completed its last flyover of Bennu around 6 a.m.

EDT (4 a.m. MDT) April 7 and is now slowly drifting away from the asteroid; however, the mission team will have to wait a few more days to find out how the spacecraft changed the surface of Bennu when it grabbed a sample of the asteroid.

It was taken by the PolyCam camera on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on March 4, 2021, from a distance of about 186 miles (300 km).

The image was obtained during the mission’s Post-TAG Operations phase, as the spacecraft slowly approached Bennu in preparation for a final observational flyby on April 7.

During the flyby, OSIRIS-REx imaged Bennu for 5.9 hours, covering more than a full rotation of the asteroid.

It will take until at least April 13 for OSIRIS-REx to downlink all of the data and new pictures of Bennu’s surface recorded during the flyby.

“We collected about 4,000 megabytes of data during the flyby,” said Mike Moreau, deputy project manager of OSIRIS-REx at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Once the mission team receives the images and other instrument data, they will study how OSIRIS-REx jumbled up Bennu’s surface.

The mission will deliver the asteroid sample to Earth on September 24, 2023.

KinetX Flight Navigator Leilah McCarthy processes navigation images to help target NASA’s OSIRIS-REx final flyby of near-Earth asteroid Bennu.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security – Regolith Explorer).

Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the spacecraft and provides flight operations.

OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.