The surface of a distant asteroid has given NASA an “astonishing” insight.
The US space agency analyzes ‘staggering’ data collected during a mission to the Bennu asteroid, a 500 meter wide monster about 200 million miles from us.
Thanks to the efforts of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2020, NASA experts have learned all they can about a asteroid that has a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth between 2175 and 2199.
OSIRIS-REx won’t physically return to Earth until 2023, but in the meantime, scientists have been studying what they can do from the mission data.
And according to research published this week, the spacecraft likely would have sunk into the asteroid’s surface if it hadn’t blasted away quickly to begin its return journey to Earth.
That is because, NASA saysthe particles that make up the outside of the Bennu asteroid are much less closely connected than we first thought.
The space agency explained that the asteroid’s surface is so loosely bound that if a person stepped on Bennu, they would feel very little resistance.
It would be like ‘stepping into a pit of plastic balls’ that you can find in a children’s playground.
“If Bennu were completely full, that would mean almost solid rock, but we found a lot of empty space in the surface,” said Kevin Walsh, a member of the OSIRIS-REx science team at the Southwest Research Institute, which is based in San Antonio.
As NASA explains, these results “add to the intrigue that has kept scientists on the edge of their seats during the OSIRIS-REx mission.”
Adding, “Bennu has always been unpredictable.”
To arrive at their conclusions, mission scientists analyzed the amount of debris visible in before and after images of the sample site, dubbed “Nightingale.”
They also looked at acceleration data collected during the spacecraft’s landing. This data revealed that when OSIRIS-REx touched the asteroid, it experienced the same amount of resistance — very little — that a person would feel when squeezing the plunger of a French Press coffee carafe.
“By the time we fired our thrusters to leave the surface, we were still plunging into the asteroid,” said Ron Ballouz, an OSIRIS-REx scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Ballouz and the research team ran hundreds of computer simulations to derive Bennu’s density and cohesion based on spacecraft images and acceleration information.
It is believed determine may contain the building blocks of life, so if a sample is recovered, scientists could test a theory that asteroids carried vital chemicals to the earth that fueled the emergence of living organisms.
But the behemoth could also cause death on a massive scale, so the tests will also help keep our nemesis and how to make sure it doesn’t hit us†
If a disastrous impact were to occur, it would release more energy than all the nuclear weapons detonated in all of human history.
Bennu is as wide as five football fields and weighs about 79 billion kilograms, which is 1,664 times heavier than the Titanic.
Fortunately, there is a very good chance that it will not come to that; so you probably don’t have to worry about the safety of your great-grandchildren.
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