NASA manages to land the Osiris-Rex spacecraft on the asteroid Bennu

NASA has achieved an important feat this Tuesday (20). The US space agency landed the Osiris-Rex spacecraft on the asteroid Bennu, which was in orbit for a period of nearly two years before landing.

Despite the success, the action was not easy, because, on an astronomical scale, the asteroid Bennu is very small. In NASA’s own words, the feat is equivalent to landing a pickup truck in a building the size of the Empire State Building in New York. The rocky and uneven surface was also presented as a great challenge in the moments before the landing, made in the crater called Nightingale, chosen for being one of the few clean areas of the surface.

NASA’s expectation of the landing will allow Osiris-Rex to collect material from the surface of Bennu. According to NASA, the asteroid contains material from the beginning of the Solar System and may represent a true “time capsule” for understanding the molecular precursors of life and the Earth’s oceans.

Despite the delay in landing, the sampling procedure takes only a few seconds. Hence the name of the strategy used: touch-and-go (TAG), something like “touch and go”, in free translation.