The University of Arizona Press
August 22, 2024
The University of Arizona Press staff recently had the opportunity to visit Carina A. Bennett and Cat W.V. Wolner, two of the five authors of Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid, at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in the Gerard P. Kuiper Space Sciences Building! Below, you can see photos from the tour, including a map of the asteroid Bennu’s surface, a close-up look at some of the sample collected from Bennu, and the powerful microscopes used to analyze and image the sample.
A major highlight of the tour was seeing a vial of sample collected from the Bennu asteroid. Bennett and Wolner revealed that, among many surprises, researchers have discovered that the asteroid is more like a “rubble pile” held together by microgravity and loose cohesion, rather than a solid rock.
Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. In 2020 the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of Bennu and collected pristine asteroid material for delivery to Earth in September 2023.
Below, members of the Press admire commemorative posters designed by Heather Roper, celebrating milestones of the OSIRIS-REx mission.
Our staff was also delighted to find not one, but two Guinness World Record certificates hanging in the halls of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory offices!
And finally, the tour concluded with a visit to the basement where we saw some extremely powerful microscopes. This equipment is stored below ground level to avoid vibrations, which is of utmost importance when analyzing images as small as 100 nanometers—far, far smaller than the width of a human hair.
Thanks for coming along with us on this virtual version of the tour! If all of these pictures have inspired you with a sense of wonder about the mysteries of the cosmos, check out our incredible list of space science books!
Header image photo credit: Leigh McDonald
