#bennu

[verdenarte]

whuh oh the dykes are mad

[mindblowingscience]

Asteroid Bennu Samples Contain Stardust Older Than Our Solar System

The ambitious mission to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth is paying off.

The ambitious mission to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth is paying off. Just as scientists had hoped, the asteroid is revealing details about the early days in our Solar System. More than just a simple space rock, Bennu contains not only material from the Solar System, but material from beyond our system. Bennu follows an orbit that brings it close to Earth every six years. That means it's classified as a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) and a potentially hazardous object (PHO).

Continue Reading.

[amnhnyc]

Research alert! Two new studies out this week find that rock and dust samples retrieved by NASA from the asteroid Bennu in 2023 contain some of the building blocks for life on our planet. What’s more? There’s evidence of underground pools of saltwater that might have served as the “broth” for these compounds to interact and combine.

The studies, published in Nature Astronomy and Nature, are the first in-depth analyses of the minerals and molecules on Bennu, a remnant of a larger celestial body that formed about 4.5 billion years ago. The findings indicate that asteroids like Bennu may have seeded early Earth with the raw ingredients that led to the emergence of life. Read more in our latest blog post.

[goddessofwisdomandwar33550336]

nation of wisdom? more like nation of polyamory

[whirligig-girl]

a Starfleet ship with a Vulcan-style warp ring. I don't know much about her, but I figure she has a chief engineer who had previously served in the Vulcan fleet, since Starfleet engineers with experience with warp rings are probably hard to come by.

[ralfmaximus]

The team struggled to decide where on the asteroid to sample. The potential targets had to be both scientifically promising and safe enough for the spacecraft to visit. Looking at two-dimensional photographs of the asteroid taken by the onboard cameras didn’t provide them with enough information about each location. So, they called in a ringer—famed Queen guitarist Brian May. In addition to shredding guitars, selling out stadiums across the world, and being knighted by the King of England, May is a trained astrophysicist. May’s focus is stereoscopy—the practice of combining two flat images to make a 3D image. May and his colleague Claudia Manzoni melded multiple images of Bennu taken at slightly different angles to transform the asteroid into an eye-popping 3D object. Potential sampling sites looked flat in regular images, “but then Brian would send the stereo, and you’re like, ‘Woah, look at that, that’s crazy—we could never get into there,’” says Lauretta.

That time Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May saved the Bennu asteroid mission.

[adelethecrow]

Egyptian bird Bennu - phoenix, soul of the god Ra, heart of Osiris

[therealakhenaten]

Osiris (As the heron Bennu).

Gift for @no-mind-to-think to thank them for following me and being the first person to follow me on tumblr!

He is thought to turn into the heron Bennu at some point in one of his myths, and given he is usually depicted fully human, I decided to depict him here as Bennu.