[ad_1]
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission successfully landed on the asteroid Bennu with a successful collection of Touch-And-Go (TAG) samples from the asteroid’s surface. On October 21, shortly after the spacecraft landed, NASA shared images of the complicated landing and collection of samples. The resulting GIF is impressive.
A series of 82 OSIRIS-REx SamCam images were assembled into a GIF to show the six seconds of contact it made with the asteroid, the agency announced during a press conference Wednesday night. The images were taken over the course of about five minutes, starting with the spacecraft about 82 feet above the surface of Bennu. There are approximately 1.25 seconds between each image that is taken.
Bennu is more than 200 million miles from Earth, and the spacecraft took rock samples from the site called Nightingale one meter from the original target location. “The sampling event went really well,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx, during Wednesday’s press conference. “We really did make a mess on the surface of this asteroid, but it’s a good mess, the kind of mess we expected.”
