HOUSTON — The asteroid Bennu, with the shape of a spinning top, turns out to be extremely rugged. That is going to make it difficult for a NASA spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, to vacuum up a sample to take back to Earth. “We are seeing Bennu regularly eject material into outer space,” said Dante Lauretta, Osiris- Rex’ s principal investigator, during a telephone news conference on Tuesday. He and other mission scientists have been presenting their findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. But while Hayabusa2 already collected its first sample from Ryugu’s surface last month, the particles erupting from Bennu posed an additional challenge for the Osiris-Rex mission.

Source: New York Times March 19, 2019 22:06 UTC