Bennu Particle Plumes

rocky asteroid ejecting small particles into space
CreditNASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin
Historical DateJanuary 19, 2019
Language
  • english

This view of asteroid 101955 Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on Jan.19, 2019 was created by combining two images taken by the NavCam 1 imager onboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: a short exposure images (1.4 ms), which shows the asteroid clearly, and a long exposure image (5 sec), which shows the particles clearly. Other image processing techniques were also applied, such as cropping and adjusting the brightness and contrast of each layer.