Historic encounters with the asteroid Bennu and the Kuiper belt object MU69 have revealed strange new features of these far-flung worlds.
Bennu, as seen by by OSIRIS-REx’s MapCam imager, as the spacecraft flew under the asteroid’s South Pole last year. By Sarah Kaplan Sarah Kaplan Reporter for Speaking of Science Email Bio Follow March 20 at 6:00 AM HOUSTON -- In recent months, NASA has explored the smallest object ever orbited and the most distant body ever encountered -- and found that both worlds are weirder than anyone could have imagined.
The strange findings from both missions were presented this week at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outside Houston, raising questions and offering clues about how the solar system works. The team will need to spend the next year or so carefully seeking a site that contains the right kind of material for this sample collection process. And when the time comes to actually grab the sample, in 2020, spacecraft operators will have a tough time navigating Bennu’s rough terrain. But NASA assured reporters Tuesday that it is up to the challenge.
But as data trickled down to Earth in the months since New Horizon’s historic flyby, scientists have slowly built a picture of the most distant body ever explored.
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