NASA's mission to collect a sample from the asteroid Bennu has left scientists reeling with new information about its surface.
Back in 2020, NASA sent a small spacecraft known as OSIRIS-REx to collect samples from the asteroid Bennu. Bennu is one of the most well-known neighboring asteroids to our planet. When OSIRIS-REx went to touch down on Bennu, though, something unexpected happen.NASA had expected its touch-and-go mission on Bennu to leave the asteroid completely unphased. If anything, a small indent would have been leftover where it touched down. A footprint in the sand, so to speak.
This should have made the surface more like solid ground. Instead, it seems that the surface of the asteroid Bennu is made of loosely packed debris, more akin to a ball pit that children play in.A NASA rendering of OSIRIS-REx approaching Bennu. Image source: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona Instead of cohesion, though, Bennu’s surface appears to be held together by microgravity. In fact, the gravitational pull on Bennu is so low that they estimate it to be less than 100,000th the pull of Earth. For additional context, gravity on the Moon is only 16 percent of that on Earth. So, on Bennu, the pull of gravity would be 16,000 times weaker than that of the Moon.
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