OSIRIS-REx effectively landed at the asteroid Bennu.

Two years and two months after it launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA's $800-million mission to the asteroid belt among Mars and Jupiter will achieve a crucial minute Monday, when the office's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is slated to meet with its scientific focus on a dim, round, carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu.

At less than 500 meters in measurement, Bennu is a little solar-system body with huge scientific potential: Astronomers speculate the asteroid's rough organization has stayed pretty much unaltered since it framed some 4.5 billion years back. Gathering and investigating an example of the asteroid could enlighten researchers a great deal regarding the starting points of our solar system, its planets, and the wellspring of natural atoms that may have offered ascend to life on Earth.

Be that as it may, before anybody can filter through an example from Bennu, NASA should initially gather and recover it. Doing as such will require a few noteworthy advances, the first is slated to commence Monday, at around 9:00 am PT when OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) will touch base at Bennu and start its months-long procedure of surveying the asteroid's surface. You can watch the entry on NASA TV (above), where the office will communicate live from mission control between 11:45 am and 12:15 pm ET. NASA will likewise air a landing sneak peek program starting at 11:15 am ET.

Subsequent to touching base at Bennu, OSIRIS-REx will go through half a month maneuvering around the asteroid, gathering information on its mass, geology, and piece. The spacecraft will start its study at an expel of about 12 miles, and come full circle in a progression of low-pass flyovers somewhere in the range of 800 feet over the asteroid's surface before entering the asteroid's circle on New Years' Eve. On the off chance that NASA is effective, Bennu will turn into the littlest protest the organization has ever circled.

The objective by then will be to distinguish a safe and scientifically encouraging example site. Notice we said "test" site—not "landing" site. OSIRIS-REx will never really contact down on the asteroid's surface. Rather, in a progression of moves presently slated for mid-2020, the spacecraft will swoop toward the surface, floating sufficiently near gather an example of Bennu's surface with its 10-foot-long automated arm. OSIRIS-REx's central goal organizers intend to acquire an example of no less than 2 ounces, however, the spacecraft is intended to oblige the same number of as 4.4 pounds of room dust. In any case, it'll be the biggest such example NASA has gathered since the Apollo missions during the 1970s.

Accepting all has gone well up to that point, OSIRIS-REx will withdraw Bennu in the spring of 2021 to start its more than multi-year venture back to Earth. Be that as it may, we're losing track of what's most important: Before OSIRIS-REx sets out on the arrival leg of its outing, it'll initially need to hit the dance floor with Bennu for a few years. That move starts today.