Ancient asteroid Bennu full of surprises for scientists in Canadian-involved space mission

It’s not every day we get to visit an asteroid. So no one should be surprised that a spacecraft’s first close-up of Bennu, a 500-metre-wide rocky relic of the early solar system, is quite literally bursting with surprises.  

The unmanned OSIRIS-REx, a NASA mission with important Canadian contributions, reached Bennu on Dec. 3. On Tuesday, the first observations were published in the journal Nature and announced at a press conference.  

“I think it’s fair to say it’s not what we had expected going in, in many different ways,” Lassonde School of Engineering Professor Michael Daly remarks. He is the director of York University’s Centre for Research in Earth and Space Science and the Canadian science lead for OLA, one of five science instruments aboard OSIRIS-REx.  

To read more about this mission, check out Kate Allen’s original article on The Toronto Star.