Title: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Captures a Sample of Asteroid (101955) Bennu
Abstract: I’ll be presenting an update to our campus community on the most recent event of the NASA OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return mission: the acquisition of the sample. Going to another world and grabbing some rock samples turns out to be a challenging endeavor, and so scientists and engineers are doing everything they (we) can to learn from the OSIRIS-REx sampling event. We just published two papers in Science last month that chronicle the event and use spacecraft engineering data to reconstruct what actually happened. What we learned tells us about the asteroid Bennu, and possibly about many near-Earth asteroids. This information will be important for future asteroid deflection experiments, should we find an asteroid headed for Earth some day!
A pizza lunch will be provided.
