A SRME Cast Episode 601 Unexpected Light Pollution

Welcome to a SRME Cast, a weekly fax based journey through the cosmos where we help

you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know.

I'm Fraser Kane, publisher of Universe Today, with me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior

scientist for the planetary sciences to do it and the director of CosmoQuest.

Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you doing Fraser?

I'm doing very well.

Have you seen the new pictures that NASA has sent back of Bennu, of the landing spot,

of Osiris Rex?

I had a really good laugh because they have this fabulous animation they did explaining what

they intended to do with the mission, which is to basically fly down with their little

arm and boop the asteroid Bennu and then fly away.

The thing is that while they're after the fact interview still showed this nice friendly

boop in reality Bennu punched really hard, really hard.

It was like on its way into the asteroid when thrusters were finally able to reverse its

motion after it descended half a meter, that's more than need up into the asteroid.

Yeah, it's like, I'm just sort of imagining it just sort of plunged its jaws into Bennu,

took a giant bite and then kicked itself back out and now these new pictures came up

from NASA like the last day or two.

You can see this scar on the space rock where it bit and it's so cool and it's so exciting

to see this whole thing now, it's time for it to come home.

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