The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will swoop down on a site called Nightingale near the north pole of the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid Bennu, which the probe has been orbiting since December 2018, mission team members announced here today (Dec. 12) during a news conference at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
"This is a day I've been dreaming of for over a decade," Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx's principal investigator and a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Space.com after the news conference. "And it's the culmination of the work of hundreds of people working thousands of hours, poring over the data that we've returned from the asteroid over the past year."