ORLANDO, Fla. – Before NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft completed it's billion-mile journey last week when it caught up to asteroid Bennu, scientists had a good idea of what the spacecraft's first close-up photos of the asteroid would look like.
It turns out models created more than 13 years ago of the ancient space rock created using Arecibo Observatory radar were not only a good estimate, but spectacularly spot-on, University of Central Florida officials announced Monday. UCF manages the National Science Foundation observatory in Puerto Rico.
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In 2013, using observations from Arecibo's 1,000-foot-diameter dish, one of the largest ground-based telescopes in the world, asteroid scientists led by OSIRIS-REx science team chief Michael Nolan published their predictions about the asteroid's shape, where its poles would be and other surface features.
“The amazing Bennu images coming out now look strikingly similar to the shape model derived from Arecibo radar data in 2013,” Arecibo research scientist Anne Virkki said.
The Arecibo radar observations even picked up a distinctive boulder on Bennu's surface, estimated to be at least 33 feet in height. Preliminary OSIRIS-REx observations show that the boulder is much larger, closer to 164 feet high and approximately 180 feet wide.
As OSIRIS-REx sent back the first images 12 miles from the asteroid's surface last week more of those predictions quickly came true.
Now, about that shape… My team planned my entire mission using an approximate shape model of asteroid Bennu (right) that was developed before I launched using ground-based radar data from @NAICobservatory (left). 🌎 📡 ☄️#WelcomeToBennu #AGU18 pic.twitter.com/YyfhLZ4IIo
— NASA's OSIRIS-REx (@OSIRISREx) December 10, 2018
"The images are spectacular and spot-on, what we expected thanks to predictions made with the instrumentation at the Arecibo Observatory in the late '90s and early 2000s," UCF physics professor and OSIRIS-REx imaging team member Humberto Campins said.
Campins adds that Arecibo’s radar data gave the NASA mission an advantage by minimizing the uncertainty in the shape of the asteroid and its orbit, which helped increase the likelihood of a successful mission.
Campins is part of the imaging team that will work for the next year to select a sight on Bennu where the spacecraft will collect a sample to bring back to Earth.
3D-printed versions of the old and new shape models for #asteroid Bennu show how accurate the early, ground-based model actually was. Bennu’s size, shape, spin rate and orientation are all very close to what the team predicted. #WelcomeToBennu #AGU18 pic.twitter.com/qN2jsRI5nM
— NASA's OSIRIS-REx (@OSIRISREx) December 10, 2018
The OSIRIS-REx team, led by University of Arizona's Dante Lauretta, announced more predictions that came true about Bennu on Monday at the annual American Geophysical Union conference in Washington, D.C., including the confirmation of water on the ancient space rock.
Mission team members say the Visible and InfraRed Spectrometer, or OVIRS, an instrument on OSIRIS-REx, found that evidence on the asteroid Bennu mirroring those of non-metallic meteorites that contain both water and organic compounds -- essentially the building blocks of life. The spacecraft's team hopes to collect and return these materials in a sample.
“When samples of this material are returned by the mission to Earth in 2023, scientists will receive a treasure trove of new information about the history and evolution of our solar system," said Amy Simon, OVIRS deputy instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.