Asteroid Bennu And The OSIRIS-REx Mission: Unveiling The Secrets Of The Solar System’s Origins

Background Document: Asteroid Bennu and the OSIRIS-REx Mission ### Introduction The OSIRIS-REx mission, launched by NASA in 2016, marked a significant milestone in space exploration. The spacecraft was designed to study the asteroid Bennu, a near-Earth object, and return samples to Earth for further analysis. The mission aimed to shed light on the origins of the solar system and provide insights into the formation and evolution of our cosmic neighborhood.

### The Asteroid Bennu Bennu is a small, carbonaceous asteroid, approximately 500 meters in diameter (Lauretta et al., 2019). It was discovered in 2011 by the Catalina Sky Survey at Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona (Christensen et al., 2013). Bennu is thought to have originated from the fragmentation of a larger asteroid, which occurred around 200 million years ago (Walsh et al., 2019). ### The OSIRIS-REx Mission The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, launched on September 8, 2016, was equipped with a suite of scientific instruments designed to study Bennu’s composition, geology, and environment (Lauretta et al., 2019).