New York — New software program, previewed closing night time (Sept. 12) right here at the Yankee Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, steps via each kink and curl in the complicated process of having NASA’s OSIRIS-REx venture to its faraway asteroid, Bennu.
The visualization, provided within the planetarium’s dome, traced the spacecraft from its Sept. eight launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, thru its laborious journey away from Earth and towards a rendezvous with the asteroid’s eccentric orbit. It will reach the asteroid in August 2018, map the asteroid, eventually seize a sample to make it returned to Earth in September 2023, and offer a window into the History of the sun machine.
“Asteroids are recorders of particular time periods inside the Records of the sun gadget, and the meteorites that come from those asteroids help us to understand the story,” Harold Connolly Jr., the challenge sample scientist for OSIRIS-REx, instructed the crowd accrued inside the planetarium. “Rocks are storybooks to a geologist, and minerals are the pages … and it is our process to recognize how these rocks have been fashioned when they were fashioned, in which they come from, and the way they have modified because they have got fashioned.” [Blastoff! OSIRIS-REx Launches The Asteroid Bennu (Video)]
