Journal article
The operational environment and rotational acceleration of asteroid (101955) Bennu from OSIRIS-REx observations
- Abstract:
- During its approach to asteroid (101955) Bennu, NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft surveyed Bennu's immediate environment, photometric properties, and rotation state. Discovery of a dusty environment, a natural satellite, or unexpected asteroid characteristics would have had consequences for the mission's safety and observation strategy. Here we show that spacecraft observations during this period were highly sensitive to satellites (sub-meter scale) but reveal none, although later navigational images indicate that further investigation is needed. We constrain average dust production in September 2018 from Bennu's surface to an upper limit of 150 g s-1 averaged over 34 min. Bennu's disk-integrated photometric phase function validates measurements from the pre-encounter astronomical campaign. We demonstrate that Bennu's rotation rate is accelerating continuously at 3.63 ± 0.52 × 10-6 degrees day-2, likely due to the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect, with evolutionary implications.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1018.4KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41467-019-09213-x
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 1291
- Publication date:
- 2019-03-19
- Acceptance date:
- 2019-02-26
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2041-1723
- Pmid:
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30890725
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
pubs:986801
- UUID:
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uuid:a795acd2-4c22-4afc-af12-fd7f128942b9
- Local pid:
-
pubs:986801
- Source identifiers:
-
986801
- Deposit date:
-
2019-05-27
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Hergenrother et al
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Notes:
- © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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