Pew :3
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has been steadily progressing since the spacecraft arrived at the diamond-shaped space rock known as Bennu a few months back, but not everything has gone completely to plan.
The rock ended up being far more, well, dirty than NASA originally expected. Bennu’s surface is absolutely packed with debris, posing a challenge for NASA’s team that still has to decide where to have the probe touch down on the asteroid to collect samples. Now, using a laser instrument built into OSIRIS-REx, NASA has a detailed look at how dangerous the surface truly is.
In a new blog post, NASA explains how it used a tool called the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter (OLA) to scan much of Bennu’s surface. The instrument paints a 3D picture of the hard surfaces the laser bounces off of, giving NASA researchers a detailed glimpse at the asteroid’s rocky surface.
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