Scientists Celebrate Successful OSIRIS-REx Touch Down

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched down on the asteroid Bennu for 4.7 seconds, a maneuver that was more than a decade in the making. Scientists at the University of Arizona nervously watched the data from the autonomous process — because the asteroid is more than 200 million miles away, messages from the spacecraft take some 20 minutes to reach Earth, meaning the entire maneuver had to be programmed ahead of time.…