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OSIRIS-REx probe detects water on asteroid Bennu

Bennu
This mosaic image of the asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 PolyCam images collected on Dec. 2 by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a range of 15 miles. A prominent boulder can be seen at lower right. (NASA / Goddard / University of Arizona Photo)

Just one week after the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s official arrival at the asteroid Bennu, the mission’s scientists have announced a significant find: Water appears to be locked inside the diamond-shaped mini-world’s clay minerals.

Two scientific instruments — known as the OSIRIS-REx Visible and Infrared Spectrometer or OVIRS, and the OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer or OTES — registered the readings during the probe’s approach phase, which started in mid-August. The findings were shared today during the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in Washington, D.C.

Spectral measurements revealed the presence of molecules with bonded hydrogen and oxygen atoms, or hydroxyls. Scientists suspect that these hydroxyl groups are contained in clays that interacted with water long ago.

The quarter-mile-wide asteroid is too small to host liquid water, but researchers surmise that liquid water was present on Bennu’s parent body — perhaps a much larger asteroid — before it broke up.

“This is really big news. This is a great surprise,” Amy Simon, OVIRS deputy instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said today during an AGU news briefing.

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Voyager 2 probe enters interstellar space

Voyager positions
This illustration shows the positions of NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, outside of the heliosphere, a protective bubble created by the Sun that extends well past the orbit of Pluto. Sizes and distances are not shown to scale. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration)

NASA says its Voyager 2 probe has become the second human-made object to fly into interstellar space — six years after its twin, Voyager 1, became the first.

Based on readings from its onboard instruments, the mission’s scientists have determined that Voyager 2 has left the solar system’s heliosphere, a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun. The spacecraft is now journeying in a region where the cold, dense interstellar medium takes the place of the tenuous, hot solar wind — more than 11 billion miles from Earth.

The milestone came more than 41 years after Voyager 2’s launch in 1977 on what was then a grand interplanetary mission, and is now a grand interstellar mission. During the 1970s and 1980s, Voyager 2 took on a “Grand Tour” with close flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, while Voyager 1 took a different course that featured a close-up of the Saturnian moon Titan.

Scientists discussed the mission’s status today in conjunction with this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, D.C.

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