Even small asteroids can strike with the force of several nuclear bombs, and only a third of such ‘near-earth’ objects have been discovered. According to a June 2018 White House report, this means there are tens of thousands of asteroids big enough to wipe out a city that we’re not even aware of yet. The same report concludes that even with current and planned capabilities, less than half of such space rocks will be located by 2033.

Retired astronaut Russell Schweickart has demanded that NASA launch a Near-Earth Object Camera - a small infrared observatory - and quickly, if we want to avoid a cataclysmic impact event. Mr Schweickart, an aerospace engineer retired astronaut who flew on the Apollo 9 mission, told Business Insider: “It's a critical discovery telescope to protect life on Earth, and it's ready to go. "For God's sake, fund it as a mainline program. Don't put it in yet another competition with science.

“NASA has a responsibility to do it, and it's not happening. “It needs to be put into the NASA budget both by NASA and by the Congress." The developers of the space camera have pitched to NASA three times - and three times they were rejected. The NASA competition it was a part of, Discovery, values scientific firsts — not ensuring humanity's safety — and thus did not grant the nearly $450 million to develop the spacecraft and a rocket with which to launch it. In 2013, a 70 foot-wide asteroid was seen streaking across the sky over Russia before landing near the town of Chelyabinsk. The force of the impact was estimated to be over 30 times that of the nuclear detonation at Hiroshima and shattered windows injuring 1500 people. In 1908, an asteroid exploded in the remote Tunguska area of Russia, flattening trees over an area nearly twice the size of New York City.</s>Launched two years ago, NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft pulled alongside the asteroid Bennu on Monday. Its mission is to survey the asteroid ahead of retrieving pristine bits of the solar system from the rock’s surface and then bringing them back to Earth in the years ahead.

With a short engine burn, the spacecraft matched the speed and direction of Bennu.

A few minutes after noon, Javier Cerna, a communications systems engineer at Lockheed Martin, which built and operates the spacecraft, announced, “We have arrived.”

What does NASA mean by “arrive?”

Osiris-Rex’s arrival at Bennu was not like the landing of NASA’s InSight spacecraft in one piece on the surface of Mars last Monday. (Happily, it landed flawlessly.)

By contrast, Osiris-Rex pulled in at a modest speed, and the moment of arrival was somewhat arbitrary. The spacecraft started the approach phase of its mission in August when it was 1.2 million miles from Bennu. On Monday, it was just 12 miles away, although still too far away to orbit the asteroid.</s>NASA is honoring its fallen astronauts with a special day of remembrance Wednesday, the 29th anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle tragedy.

Space agency officials are conducting ceremonies at several different sites around the country during the annual event, to pay tribute to the three crewmembers killed in 1967's Apollo 1 fire, the seven astronauts lost when Challenger exploded in 1986 and the seven crewmembers who died when the shuttle Columbia broke apart upon re-entry to Earth's atmosphere in 2003.

"NASA's Day of Remembrance honors members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery," agency officials said in a statement. "NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and other agency senior officials will hold an observance and wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia from 9 to 10:30 a.m. [ET] Wednesday." [NASA's Fallen Astronauts: A Photo Memorial]

Various NASA centers are also hosting their own observances, officials added. The deputy director of Kennedy Space Center in Florida, for example, will lead a brief ceremony at the facility's visitor center at 10:30 a.m. ET, and Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will hold a candle-lighting ceremony at 10 a.m. local time (11 a.m. ET).

The Apollo 1 fire, NASA's first mission-related tragedy, occurred on Jan. 27, 1967. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were inside their crew capsule at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, conducting a test of the vehicle, which was scheduled to launch on an orbital mission less than a month later. A fire broke out, and all three crewmembers were killed.

The next spaceflight disaster came 19 years and one day later. On Jan. 28, 1986, Challenger disintegrated just 73 seconds after blasting off, killing Francis "Dick" Scobee, Ronald McNair, Mike Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Greg Jarvis and Connecticut teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was supposed to be the first teacher in space.

The accident investigation revealed that an O-ring in one of the orbiter's two solid rocket boosters failed on that cold morning, allowing hot gas to escape and causing the shuttle's huge external fuel tank to explode.

NASA grounded the space shuttle for nearly three years in the wake of the Challenger tragedy, returning the vehicle to flight in September 1988 with the STS-26 mission of the shuttle Discovery.The shuttle fleet flew without any serious incidents for another decade and a half. Then, on Feb. 1, 2003, Columbia broke apart as it was gliding back to Earth after a 16-day space mission. All seven astronauts aboard were killed: Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, David Brown, Michael Anderson and Ilan Ramon, who was Israel's first astronaut.

Investigators later determined that Columbia sustained damage during launch, when a piece of foam insulation broke off the external fuel tank and careened into the orbiter's left wing. The impact breached Columbia's heat shield in that spot, allowing hot atmospheric gases to infiltrate the wing during re-entry.

Another lengthy pause in shuttle operations followed this disaster. The next return-to-flight mission, also flown by Discovery, came in July 2005.

The space shuttle was grounded for good in July 2011, after flying 135 orbital missions over the course of 30 years. NASA currently relies on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get its astronauts to and from the International Space Station but is encouraging the development of private American spaceships to take over this role. Astronaut taxis being built by SpaceX and Boeing should be ready to start flying crews by 2017, representatives of both companies say.

NASA officials aren't the only people who are pausing Wednesday to reflect on the risks involved with human spaceflight and to honor the memories of those who gave their lives for the cause. For example, European Space Agency astronaut Sam Cristoforetti sent out this note Tuesday to her 293,000 Twitter followers:

"May the memory of such a dark time in our past enlighten the future with wisdom and compassion. ?#RemembranceDay"</s>Here's what's in store for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft over the next few weeks.

NASA’s first asteroid-sampling mission, the OSIRIS-REx, has finally arrived at its destination — a diamond-shaped space rock that floats some 76 million miles from Earth and goes by the name of Bennu.

To get there, OSIRIS-REx has chased Bennu for a little more than two years, traveling 1.24 billion miles through space to catch up with the 1,650-foot-wide asteroid, NASA announced earlier today.

Today’s triumph comes exactly one week after the space agency successfully landed a spacecraft on Mars — the first one to touch down on Martian ground in six years and the eighth to ever make it to the red planet.

“Achievement unlocked: ‘We have arrived!'” NASA wrote on Twitter a few hours ago.

The much-awaited rendezvous with the near-Earth asteroid occurred at around 12 p.m. ET, after the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft fired its thrusters for a small burn and pulled within 12 miles of Bennu’s surface. According to Phys.org, due to the vast distance between Earth and the OSIRIS-REx, it took seven minutes for flight controllers at Lockheed Martin — which built the spacecraft — to receive confirmation that the intrepid probe arrived at Bennu.

What’s Next For The OSIRIS-REx Mission

Short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was sent to collect regolith samples from asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft is slated to bring back least 60 grams (equal to about 30 sugar packets) of dust and gravel from the space rock’s boulder-strewn surface.

Now that it has finally reached its target, the OSIRIS-REx is currently flying along the space rock, waiting to enter its orbit. During the next few weeks, the probe will perform five flybys of the asteroid’s poles and equator before it finally slides into Bennu’s orbit on December 31.

As the Inquisitr previously reported, these upcoming flybys will bring OSIRIS-REx as close as 4.3 miles of the asteroid’s rugged terrain, so that the probe can map the space rock and gather fresh data on Bennu’s mass and rotation.

“The spacecraft will spend almost a year surveying the asteroid with five scientific instruments with the goal of selecting a location that is safe and scientifically interesting to collect the sample,” NASA officials explained in a statement.

The approach to Bennu has enabled OSIRIS-REx to take a new series of photos of the near-Earth asteroid. The images — 36 in total — were taken from a distance of around 50 miles over a period of four hours and 18 minutes.

The new frames capture the asteroid’s full rotation and were put together in a GIF, released on Twitter after the probe’s arrival at Bennu.

Today’s milestone kicks the mission into full gear, marking the beginning of science operations. However, OSIRIS-REx won’t swoop down to Bennu’s surface until July 2020, when the spacecraft will make a brief contact with the asteroid to snag the regolith samples.

The probe won’t actually land on the asteroid, but rather descend to its surface to blast it with nitrogen gas and vacuum dislodged fragments for collection.

If everything goes as planned, OSIRIS-REx will head back home in March 2021 and deliver the precious samples in September 2023.

Bennu is a carbon-rich asteroid estimated to be around 45-billion-years-old. The space rock dates back to the beginning of our solar system and likely took shape some 10 million years after our planets were formed.

“Bennu is a time capsule from the early solar system, having been preserved in the vacuum of space,” states NASA.

Because the asteroid is so old, scientists believe that Bennu could contain organic molecules similar to those which ignited the spark of life on Earth. Studying this ancient relic could help us unravel our cosmic past and reveal more clues on the origin of life.

When NASA chose to send its first-asteroid sampling mission to Bennu, the space agency was looking at the space rock’s size, age, composition, and proximity to our planet.

The asteroid measures just 492 meters across — “which is a bit larger than the height of the Empire State Building in New York City,” notes NASA — and has a rotational period of 4.3 hours. This means that Bennu is big enough to move relatively slowly and retain regolith as it spins around its axis.

Although the asteroid is currently drifting through space between the orbits or Earth and Mars, Bennu actually originated further out in the solar system. The space rock was likely forged in the Asteroid Belt that stretches between Mars and Jupiter and is believed to have broken off from a larger asteroid around 700 million to 2 billion years ago. This massive collision pushed Bennu closer to our neck of the woods, which explains the asteroid’s current location.

Come December 31, Bennu will become the smallest celestial body to ever be orbited by a manmade spacecraft.</s>Today is history in the making for NASA. The spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is reaching the Asteroid Bennu in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The craft began its journey in September 2016, and this simply marks a monumental next step. The craft won’t actually ever land on Bennu, but it will hover close enough to the surface to gather samples. Read on to find out exactly what time the craft will reach the asteroid.

OSIRIS-REx will reach Bennu at approximately 12 p.m. Eastern (however, NASA’s live stream of the event begins at 11:45 a.m. Eastern, so you’ll want to tune in around that time to make sure you don’t miss it.)

This means that OSIRIS-REx is arriving in the following time zones (approximately):

The time in various cities includes:

See more time zones here.

Remember, this is an approximate time. The actual arrival could be earlier, which is why NASA’s live stream is starting 15 minutes earlier than this time (and its pre-show is starting 45 minutes early.) You can watch the live stream below. NASA will have other programming airing on the stream below before the OSIRIS-REx program starts:

Remember: OSIRIS-REx is not landing on the asteroid today. It’s simply arriving, and then the craft will spend a few weeks surveying the asteroid with low flyovers. It will enter the asteroid’s orbit on New Year’s Eve, NASA currently plans. The craft will never actually touch the asteroid’s surface, but instead will hover over the surface close enough to get a sample. This part will be done around mid-2020. OSIRIS-REx will then depart Bennu in 2021.

OSIRIS-REx will return the sample to Earth in September 2023. The sample will be returned to Earth through a freefall method from space. Once it’s at an altitude of about 20.8 miles, it will deploy the first of two parachutes for a landing in Utah.

Are you excited about the craft’s arrival? Many people are talking about it on Twitter already.

Other exciting things are happening in space news this week too:

Will you be watching the OSIRIS-REx arrival?</s>NASA has had a busy few months already but its OSIRIS-REx asteroid probe isn’t waiting for anyone. The spacecraft, which has spent the last two years traveling to the space rock known as Bennu, will finally meet its target today, and NASA will be live streaming the event so we can all enjoy their excitement.

The OSIRIS-REx mission is an important one for NASA because it aims to help researchers learn more about near-Earth asteroids, including those that could one day pose a threat to Earth. With two years of flying already under its belt, expectations are high for the probe, but first NASA has to make sure it arrives safe and sound, and that’s what today is all about.

The actual arrival of the spacecraft won’t be a touchdown or landing on the asteroid. OSIRIS-REx will actually need to spend a good deal of time hanging out in orbit around Bennu before it makes its move, so today is just confirmation of the probe’s arrival.

After today, OSIRIS-REx will spend nearly a year examining Bennu and sending back highly detailed images of its surface. As NASA studies these images the OSIRIS-REx team will decide on the best possible place to land. Upon landing, it’ll take samples of the asteroid’s surface and then return back to Earth to deliver that material to eager scientists.

Today’s NASA stream will begin at approximately 11:45 a.m. EST and will last for around a half hour. We’ll get to hear commentary from NASA staff explaining exactly what is going on with the spacecraft, and we’ll learn its status updates in real time along with the folks in mission control. Expect to hear lots of cheering when confirmation comes that OSIRIS-REx finally found its new home around Bennu.</s>NASA’s space probe is expected to arrive at its distant target today at around 5pm GMT (12pm EST). The mission will be briefly streamed live across YouTube, Facebook Live, Ustream and NASA’s website. You can watch it unfold live in the embedded live stream below, courtesy of NASA. The asteroid approach will be broadcast online from 4.45pm to 5.15pm GMT (11.45am to 12.15pm EST).

What is the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu? Today’s broadcast marks the end of an 815-day-long venture through space towards the large asteroid. NASA’s goal with the OSIRIS-REx mission is to collect rocky samples from a so-called Near Earth Asteroid for study back on Earth. Asteroid Bennu was specifically chosen for this mission because scientists believe it is one of the oldest, closest and most well-preserved asteroids in the solar system. Studying Bennu’s composition could hold the keys to unlocking the earliest secrets of the universe and how life started on Earth. NASA said: “We know from having studied Bennu through Earth- and space-based telescopes that it is a carbonaceous, or carbon-rich, asteroid. Carbon is the hinge upon which organic molecules hang. READ MORE: Asteroid Bennu: How deadly is NASA’s killer asteroid threat heading for Earth?

“Bennu is likely rich in organic molecules, which are made of chains of carbon bonded with atoms of oxygen, hydrogen, and other elements in a chemical recipe that makes all known living things.

“Besides carbon, Bennu also might have another component important to life: water, which is trapped in the minerals that make up the asteroid.” The space rock has an estimated diameter of 1,614ft (492m) and spins around its orbit in the same way the Earth does. Spinning asteroids are incredibly tricky to land on but Bennu’s size makes it an easier target for landing – it revolves once every 4.3 hours. READ MORE: Asteroid Bennu path: Where is Asteroid 2135? When will asteroid hit Earth? – NASA warning

OSIRIS-REx blasted off towards the asteroid on September 8, 2016, and has already covered billions of miles on its lonesome voyage. But the space probe will not touch down on Bennu until next year, when it dips down to collect regolith rock dust samples. NASA said: “Going to an asteroid – especially a small one that has never been visited before – is different than going to a planet like Mars.

“When OSIRIS-REx arrives on Monday, the spacecraft won’t land or go into orbit around Bennu yet. “It will execute a small engine burn marking the end of its journey toward Bennu and setting it up to operate around the asteroid.” NASA hopes to collect its samples sometime around mid-2020. The space probe will then return to Earth in 2023 and drop its samples for collection in a capsule.</s>After traveling through space for more than two years and over two billion kilometers, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft arrived at its destination, asteroid Bennu, on Monday, Dec. 3, 2018. The spacecraft will spend almost a year surveying the asteroid with five scientific instruments with the goal of selecting a location that is safe and scientifically interesting to collect the sample. OSIRIS-REx will return the sample to Earth in September 2023.</s>What does NASA mean by "arrive?"

What happens next?

What can you tell me about Bennu?

What are scientists hoping to learn from Bennu?

How will Osiris-Rex grab a piece of Bennu?

Why does it take so long to collect a sample and return to Earth?

Haven't other spacecraft explored asteroids already? What's so special about Osiris-Rex?

Is this the most contorted name of a NASA mission ever?

The spacecraft now begins a close study of the primitive space rock, seeking clues to the early solar system. Launched two years ago , NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft pulled alongside the asteroid Bennu on Monday. Its mission is to survey the asteroid ahead of retrieving pristine bits of the solar system from the rock's surface and then bringing them back to Earth in the years ahead.With a short engine burn, the spacecraft matched the speed and direction of Bennu.A few minutes after noon, Javier Cerna, a communications systems engineer at Lockheed Martin, which built and operates the spacecraft, announced, "We have arrived."Osiris-Rex's arrival at Bennu was not like the landing of NASA's InSight spacecraft in one piece on the surface of Mars last Monday. (Happily, i t landed flawlessly .)There was no drama, just a smooth transition to the next phase of the mission.Osiris-Rex will make a series of passes over the asteroid at a range of 4.3 miles for an initial survey to better determine its mass, rate of spin and shape.By studying a primitive asteroid, scientists hope to get a better idea of what was around in the solar system's earliest days. Dante Lauretta , the principal investigator of Osiris-Rex, said he was particularly interested in gleaning information about organic molecules like amino acids, the building blocks of proteins found on Earth that are also known to exist in interstellar space.The goal is to collect at least a couple of ounces of material and possibly as much as 4.4 pounds. The spacecraft carries enough nitrogen to attempt to extract material three times if necessary.A quicker mission would have required a larger spacecraft carrying more fuel - more expensive than the $800 million cost of Osiris-Rex. Instead, the spacecraft took a more efficient but longer trajectory, taking advantage of a flyby of Earth last year to fling it on a path to intersect Bennu. Scientists also want to study Bennu is as much detail as they can before heading back to Earth.After departing Bennu in 2021, Osiris-Rex will pass by Earth in September 2023, dropping off a capsule with the samples that will land via parachute in a Utah desert.Quite a few spacecraft have made flybys of asteroids, beginning with NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which passed within 1,000 miles of the asteroid Gaspra in 1991 en route to Jupiter. NASA's NEAR Shoemaker (NEAR is short for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) went into orbit around the near-Earth asteroid Eros in 2000. Even though it was not designed to land on the asteroid, NEAR Shoemaker did just that in 2001 and continued operating for two weeks from the surface of Eros.The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa collected some dust samples from an asteroid and returned them in Earth in 2005. A follow-up mission, Hayabusa2 is, like Osiris-Rex, headed to a carbon-rich asteroid and is scheduled to bring its samples back to Earth in 2020 However, not all asteroids are alike, and Osiris-Rex is expected to bring much more rock and dirt back than the Japanese missions. Comparing data from different asteroids will create a fuller picture of what the early solar system was like.Perhaps. Dr. Lauretta said that as he jotted some themes of the scientific objectives - origins, spectroscopy, resources and security - he had most of the letters of Osiris, the Egyptian god who was the lord of the underworld but who also represented the seeds of regeneration to new life."It was the dual nature of the Osiris myth," Dr. Lauretta said a couple of years ago before launch. "I had to buy a couple of vowels."With some finagling, he came up with Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer.Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry, and the planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose research involved the control of chaos. @kchangnyt</s>Update: NASA has released stunning visuals of OSIRIS-REx's approach to the asteroid Bennu. Take a look:

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched in 2016, but today it will begin to orbit its destination: the asteroid Bennu. When it does, Bennu will break the record for the smallest object ever orbited by a man-made spacecraft. NASA will begin a process of learning more about the small asteroids that reside in our part of the solar system.

You can watch the livestream of the arrival here:

OSIRIS-REx is designed to do something that only one other spacecraft has ever done before: collect a sample and return it to Earth. The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa managed that feat in the early 2000s, but its target was the large asteroid Itokawa. Bennu is much smaller, which makes it both a trickier target to rendezvous with and more difficult to land on.

That landing is pretty important, since the sample return is the whole point of the mission, but there is a whole list of factors that make it extremely difficult for NASA to pull off. The agency is actually not sure what exactly Bennu is made of, which is a problem for a spacecraft looking to touch down. Bennu could have a hard, rocky surface or a soft one, and if NASA guesses wrong it could screw up the entire landing.

That’s why NASA is opting to avoid the landing altogether. Instead, OSIRIS-REx will perform something of a drive-by sample collection. The spacecraft will touch the surface with its sample-collection arm for only a few seconds, hoovering up some rock samples before taking off again. This is something no one has ever done before, so it’ll be exciting to see how it works.

After the arrival at Bennu today, OSIRIS-REx will spend the next year surveying the asteroid and trying to find a good location to collect its samples. Then, it will begin that sample-collection process—NASA will get several tries to pull it off—and is expected to return to Earth sometime in 2023. Then, scientists can use those samples to learn more about Bennu and other asteroids that orbit in the vicinity of Earth.
NASA's space probe OSIRIS-REx arrives at the asteroid Bennu.