09 May 2018
First confirmed carbon-rich asteroid found in Kuiper Belt
... is one such body and it likely started life in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Carbonaceous or C-type asteroids are the most common type of asteroid – Bennu, the target asteroid for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is one, but like most...
22 September 2017
OSIRIS-REx makes closest Earth approach today
... so that it is hurled back out into space on the correct path to rendezvous with its target; Bennu Bennu is a B-type asteroid with a ~500 meter diameter. It completes an orbit around the Sun every 436.604 days (1.2 years) and...
21 February 2019
Hayabusa2 starts descent towards Ryugu
... comets were the water-delivery vehicles billions of years ago. "We believe carbon-rich (C-type) asteroids may have significant amounts of water locked up in their rocks,” says Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, from Queen's University ...
03 December 2018
OSIRIS-REx officially arrives at Bennu today
... this potentially hazardous object. Bennu is possibly a fragment of a once much larger object from the Polana family of asteroids and is made up of material that could have remained unchanged since it clumped together during the first 10 million...
05 April 2019
Hayabusa2 probe 'bombs' asteroid to create a crater
... was intended to carve out a 10 metre-wide hole in the asteroid after it was fired toward Ryugu’s surface at up to 2 kilometres... the three landers it released last year to explore the asteroid’s surface. After dropping the impactor, Hayabusa-2 had 40 ...
January 2019
Visiting an asteroid to find out how life began
... inwards through the gravitational influence of the giant planets. Such rocks might be similar to the type of asteroid that Hayabusa2 is currently exploring. Asteroid Ryugu orbits the Sun between Earth and Mars. It was almost certainly once part...
