NASA spacecraft approaches the ancient Bennu planet

Two years after being launched from Florida (USA), the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft of the US Aerospace Agency (NASA) is coming closer, with the aim of sampling the space dust here, possibly help find clues about life in the solar system.

The ship OSIRIS-REx took the first picture, not really clear about the planet about the size of a small mountain, with a diameter of 500m. According to programming, OSIRIS-REx flies around Bennu and uses a robotic arm to "touch" the surface of the asteroid, taking its dust samples to Earth in 2023.

It is expected that on December 31, OSIRIS-REx will begin surveying the surface of Bennu.

The first pictures of Bennu were taken on August 17 at a distance of about 2.3 million km. The head of the research program of OSIRIS-REx, University of Arizona scientist Dante Lauretta, said: "This is the closest position the ship can reach to Bennu. This makes sense because we are now is very close to this asteroid, closer to the times Bennu approaches closest to the Earth ".

Bennu was chosen among the 500,000 asteroids in the solar system, as it turned close to Earth's orbit around the Sun, and was the oldest star NASA ever discovered.

According to astronomers, there is a very small possibility (probability 1 / 2,700) that Bennu will collide with the Earth in 2135. Another reason, this is a carbon-rich star, the type of Universe The pillar is believed to have provided raw materials for life on Earth billions of years ago.

The $ 800 million OSIRIS-REx, not the first ship to visit an asteroid with the goal of bringing the dust here. The Japanese did this first and Europe set foot on a comet. But this is NASA's first space-sampling mission, and the goal of this mission is to bring back the largest ever, about 60g. It is expected that on December 31, OSIRIS-REx will begin surveying the surface of Bennu.

Americans set foot on the Moon in the Apollo era of the 60s and 70s of the last century and collected and brought the Earth 382 kg of stone on the Moon. Next December, the OSIRIS-REx vessel will begin a detailed exploration of the surface of the asteroid Bennu. However, planetary dust samples will not be taken before July 2020.