NASA mission to estimate impact

Feb 09, 2013 |

Nasa plans to launch a new mission in 2016 to find potentially hazardous asteroids and predict their impact threat to Earth. Nasa’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission will arrive at RQ36 in 2018 and orbit the asteroid until 2021.

By communicating continuously with a spacecraft in orbit around RQ36, the team will get a much better idea of the asteroid’s orbit. “We expect OSIRIS-REx will enable us to make an estimate of the Yarkovsky force on RQ36.”

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