“It was not an easy decision,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, told colleagues at a NASA town hall. ADADThe spacecraft is equipped with an extendible arm containing a nitrogen gas canister and a sample collection tube. Bennu is the smallest object a spacecraft has ever orbited, and OSIRIS-REx has already gotten closer to the asteroid than any other craft has gone before. The terrain across the asteroid is far more treacherous than OSIRIS-REx was originally designed to navigate. The sample site, a spot known as Nightingale, sits in a crater in Bennu’s northern hemisphere.

Source: Washington Post December 17, 2019 13:52 UTC