Asteroid Bennu Sample Site Flyovers

When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu in December 2018, its close-up images confirmed what mission planners had predicted nearly two decades before: Bennu is made of loose material weakly clumped together by gravity, and shaped like a spinning top. This major validation, however, was accompanied by a major surprise. Scientists had expected Bennu’s surface to consist of fine-grained material like a sandy beach, but instead OSIRIS-REx was greeted by a rugged world littered with boulders – the size of cars, the size of houses, the size of football fields. The main science goal of OSIRIS-REx is to briefly touch down on Bennu and collect a sample for return to Earth, but the asteroid’s unexpected roughness could pose a hazard to the spacecraft. Areas for safely touching down are fewer and smaller than anticipated, and OSIRIS-REx will have to navigate to them with unprecedented accuracy. In mid-2019, mission planners identified four candidate sample collection sites, and named them after birds that can be found in Egypt: Osprey, Kingfisher, Nightingale, and Sandpiper. In December 2019, mission planners announced that they had selected Nightingale as the primary sample collection site, and Osprey as the backup. Late in 2020, OSIRIS-REx will descend to Bennu's surface and collect a sample of pristine material from the origins of the solar system that will be studied on Earth for decades to come. Full resolution video file available at: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4771