NASA is looking into the asteroid that she plans to take

OSIRIS-REx from NASA is about a month away from his destination, the potentially dangerous asteroid Bennu, and can finally get a glimpse of the rock from the space that he plans to fly.

It turns out that Bennu looks a lot like the diamond shape The Ryugu asteroid currently visited by the Japanese Hayabusa-2 mission.

"The fact that the Japanese mission has reached its goal a little earlier than we have turned out to be extremely interesting, because we can now interpret our results and compare them to the results obtained by another mission almost in real time," explains Julia de Leon. a member of the scientific team of the mission of the Institute of Astrofísica de Canarias, in a statement.

OSIRIS-REx was launched more than two years ago on September 8, 2016 and is expected to arrive in Bennu on December 2. Once there, the satellite will spend the better part of a year and a half watching the asteroid.

The hope is to bring back a small piece of the asteroid on Earth in 2023. Once here, the sample from another world will be analyzed at the atomic level by scientists looking for the constituent elements of life.