From NASA Goddard:
When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu in December 2018, its close-up pictures confirmed what mission planners had predicted almost twenty years earlier than: Bennu is fabricated from free materials weakly clumped collectively by gravity, and formed like a spinning high. This main validation, nevertheless, was accompanied by a serious shock. Scientists had anticipated Bennu’s floor to encompass fine-grained materials like a sandy seaside, however have been as a substitute greeted by a rugged world plagued by boulders – the dimensions of automobiles, the dimensions of homes, the dimensions of soccer fields. Now, due to laser altimetry knowledge and high-resolution imagery from OSIRIS-REx, we will take a tour of Bennu’s exceptional terrain.
This spectacular video tour of the asteroid Bennu has gotten numerous criticism on YouTube for being extra concerning the mythological origins of the names used for its geologic formations than the science behind the options themselves. One’s mileage will at all times differ. I liked listening to concerning the myths behind the names and it jogged my memory of the truth that even within the exact and rigorous realms of science, plenty of thought, creativeness, and humor go into the naming of issues.