The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission - whose name stands for 'Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer' - launched in September 2016. The probe is now circling about 1 mile (1.6 km) from Bennu's surface, mission team members said. And Japan's Hayabusa2 mission is taking a similar tack at the 3,000-foot-wide, or 900 m, asteroid Ryugu - basically, flying along with the space rock rather than circling it.) OSIRIS-REx also set a new mark today for the closest orbit of a small body. But Hayabusa never actually went into orbit around Itokawa. (The asteroid Itokawa, which was visited by Japan's Hayabusa mission in 2005, is smaller than Bennu. 'So, we do have to get a little more information to proceed every step of the way.' Before today, the smallest object to be circled by a probe was the 2.5-mile-wide (4.1 kilometers) Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe orbited from 2014 to 2016. Such work was required before attempting orbital insertion because 'maneuvering around a small body that basically has no gravity is a very challenging endeavor,' OSIRIS-REx Deputy Principal Investigator Heather Enos, also of the University of Arizona, told earlier this month. For the last four weeks, mission team members have been taking the space rock's measure, nailing down the object's mass and mapping out its shape in great detail. 'Entering orbit around Bennu is an amazing accomplishment that our team has been planning for years.' OSIRIS-REx officially arrived at Bennu on Dec. 'The team continued our long string of successes by executing the orbit-insertion maneuver perfectly,' Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. The OSIRIS-REx probe achieved orbit around the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid Bennu with an eight-second engine burn today (Dec. The samples are due here in 2023.A NASA asteroid-sampling probe has begun circling its space-rock target, setting a new record for the smallest body ever orbited by a spacecraft. The spacecraft is headed back to Earth on a long, roundabout loop after collecting samples from the large, spinning rubble pile of an asteroid, considered one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system. “So I think that overall, the situation has improved,” he told reporters. While the odds of a strike have risen from 1-in-2,700 to 1-in-1,750 over the next century or two, scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu’s path thanks to NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft, according to Farnocchia.

“We shouldn’t be worried about it too much,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who served as the study’s lead author. The bad news is that the space rock has a slightly greater chance of clobbering Earth than previously thought.īut don’t be alarmed: Scientists reported Wednesday that the odds are still quite low that Bennu will hit us in the next century. (AP) - The good news is that scientists have a better handle on asteroid Bennu’s whereabouts for the next 200 years.

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