Newswatch 16's John Hickey shows us what NASA scientists are hoping to learn about the asteroid and our early universe in this week's Skywatch 16.
A NASA spacecraft returned a sample of an asteroid to Earth over the weekend.
“Bennu is set to probably come very close to Earth within the next 150 years,” said Dr. Heather Graham,Dr. Graham is part of the team of NASA scientists that sent an unmanned spacecraft to asteroid Bennu, which is over 200 million miles away. Bennu is considered a near-earth asteroid. It passes by once every six years.
It spent two years surveying the surface to understand the composition and the geology, the topography of the surface of the asteroid. Originally launched in 2016, the robotic collection spacecraft called Osiris-Rex, returned an asteroid sample to Earth over the weekend. “Picked a sampling site and sucked up a bunch of rocks and dust and brought it back to us,” explained Dr. Graham.“Asteroids represent a huge part of the solar system. There are almost a million asteroids out there, and they're remnants of the early part of our solar system when the planets were forming,” said Dr. Graham.
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