Episode 97: Where’s Bennu?
The goal of the OSIRIS-Rex mission is to collect a sample from an asteroid and bring it back to Earth. The asteroid Bennu has an Earth-like orbit and every six years, comes very close to planet Earth and these close encounters give Bennu a high probability of impacting Earth in the late 22nd century. Mike Nolan and other members of the OSIRIS-Rex project team are using large telescopes and high-resolution imaging to track Bennu so they can better predict the asteroids path and hopefully provide information that will help the asteroid from a potential collision with the Earth. In this episode: Mike Nolan, Asteroid Geophysical Scientist with the OSIRIS-Rex Project Mission; Tim Swindle, Ph.D., Director and Head of the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Lab