Asteroid approach, Science operations begin! Options

[Holder of the Tw...]

News conference ready to start in fifteen minutes. (2pm EST December 10th)

LINK

[pbanholzer]

News conference ready to start in fifteen minutes. (2pm EST December 10th)

LINK

The AGU link has expired but it is available on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRCzK8uZvoY

[elakdawalla]

Here are a few images from the press briefing materials shared yesterday, including a color MapCam portrait. If you break the MapCam view down into its channels, you can see that they didn't reproject the images before combining them into an RGB product -- there's evident rotation of the asteroid between red, green, and blue channels. They're also massively stretched. Can any of you image processing sorcerers do a better job with the image processing and maybe create a nice color portrait of Bennu?

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[elakdawalla]

This is the best I can do -- please someone here do better than me so I don't have to post this garbage on my website

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[Ian R]

Here's a mediocre effort of my own, Emily

[charborob]

Bennu North Pole flyover.

[kenny]

OSIRIS-REx has successfully entered orbit around Bennu.
It is orbiting a mere 1 mile (1.75km) from the centre of the asteroid !

More details here...

NASA announcement

Happy New Year to all, and looking forward to an extraordinary few days in solar system exploration...

[MarkG]

[quote ...It is orbiting a mere 1 mile (1.75km) from the centre of the asteroid !
[/quote]

I believe the orbital period is 62 hours, which makes the orbital velocity about 3 meters/minute, 50mm/sec. (10ʻ/min, 2"sec).

[Marcin600]

New image - Bennu’s south pole: https://www.asteroidmission.org/mapcam-sout...0181217t061345/

I see a nice little crater with a flat bottom and a typical (?) grouping of large boulders in the pole region

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[Explorer1]

Very nice high-res view near the north pole: https://www.asteroidmission.org/mapcam-north-pole-20190220/

[Marcin600]

New pics - region of Bennu’s northern hemisphere close up: https://www.asteroidmission.org/2019-02-25-...-compilation-3/
with: "pond” of regolith that is mostly devoid of large rocks" and "15 meter boulder"

[Hungry4info]

Bennu has plumes! (or perhaps rather ejections of material)

Shortly after the discovery of the particle plumes on Jan. 6, the mission science team increased the frequency of observations, and subsequently detected additional particle plumes during the following two months. Although many of the particles were ejected clear of Bennu, the team tracked some particles that orbited Bennu as satellites before returning to the asteroid’s surface.

The OSIRIS-REx team initially spotted the particle plumes in images while the spacecraft was orbiting Bennu at a distance of about one mile (1.61 kilometers). Following a safety assessment, the mission team concluded the particles did not pose a risk to the spacecraft. The team continues to analyze the particle plumes and their possible causes.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/877/nasa-...-big-surprises/



More images:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13154

[Explorer1]

So Bennu apparently has temporary moons every once in a while. I wonder if the spacecraft could get close to one of the larger ones to resolve it. Hopefully the team is confident these events won't be too big a deal and they can narrow the site they occur (I wouldn't want one nearby during sample collection!).

[PhilipTerryGraha...]

So we've uncovered a contact binary KBO that's really flat, and a Near-Earth asteroid that's spewing rocks into its orbit. What other weeeird stuff is 2019 gonna give to us, I wonder? On topic though, has the OSIRIS-REx team been able to locate where the sources of these ejections are on Bennu? I anticipate that'll be a new priority.

[nprev]

Hard to think of anything that would cause this aside from straight-up thermal expansion. Pockets of volatiles sublimating would presumably produce far more energetic (and dense, and visible) plumes.

Maybe it does something similar at aphelion when contraction happens, or maybe that's just how the mechanical energy gets 'loaded' for perihelion passage burps like these. Still...without any significant surface gravitation that's not gonna cause much compression of surface materials at all.

Regardless: Cool. That's why we're here.