* Astronomy

NASA's OSIRIS-REx Begins Earth-Trojan Asteroid Search

A NASA spacecraft begins its search Thursday for an enigmatic class of near-Earth objects known as Earth-Trojan asteroids.
OSIRIS-REx, currently on a two-year outbound journey to the asteroid Bennu, will spend almost two weeks searching for evidence of these small bodies.
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Post launch Status of Asteroid Sample Return Mission

Spoiler

Asteroid Mission Will Carry Student X-ray Experiment

At 7:05 pm (EDT), Thursday, Sept. 8, NASA plans to launch a spacecraft to a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu. Among that spacecraft's five instruments is a student experiment that will use X-rays to help determine Bennu's surface composition.
The Regolith X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer, or REXIS, was developed by researchers and students at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), both in Cambridge, Mass. It is only the second student experiment to fly on a NASA interplanetary mission.

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NASA Invites Public to Submit Messages for Asteroid Mission Time Capsule

NASA is inviting the worldwide public to submit short messages and images on social media that could be placed in a time capsule aboard a spacecraft launching to an asteroid in 2016.
Topics for submissions by the public should be about solar system exploration in 2014 and predictions for space exploration activities in 2023. The mission team will choose 50 tweets and 50 images to be placed in the capsule. Messages can be submitted Sept. 2 - 30.
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www.asteroidmission.org/timecapsule