Sara Russell on What the Asteroids Can Tell Us About the Earth
Sara Russell is a professor of planetary sciences and leader of the Planetary Materials Group at the Natural History Museum in London. She is a member of the science team for both of the current space missions to obtain samples from an asteroid and return them to Earth. She even has an asteroid named after her.
Using asteroids as snapshots of the early solar system, her research seeks to unravel how the solar system formed and cast light on questions such as how the Earth got its water and organic materials.
Photo credit: Ubiquity Press
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Although the majority of asteroids lie in a belt just beyond the orbit of Mars, there are a few that lie farther out along the orbit of Jupiter called the Jupiter Trojans, and some farther in that are referred to as the near-Earth asteroids. The targets of both the current sample return missions - Bennu (OSIRIS-REx mission) and Ryugu (Hyabusa 2 mission) are near-Earth asteroids.
Diagram courtesy of NASA
Asteroid Bennu is the target of the NASA OSIRIS-REx sample return mission. It is about half a kilometer across at its equator. Bennu makes one orbit around the Sun every 1.2 years. It makes one full rotation on its axis every 4.3 hours.
Image courtesy of NASA
Courtesy of the University of Arizona
OSIRIX-REx simulation of touchdown on Bennu to obtain a sample from the surface.
Image courtesy of NASA