Wow NASA Enlists a Vatican Astronomer - Brother Bob Macke - in a Historic Mission to Examine Asteroid Bennu with Samples from Osiris-Rex! VIDEO

A Vatican astronomer is helping NASA in a historic mission to study an asteroid!
NASA has enlisted the help to a Jesuit brother, who is a bit of a 'rock' star when it comes to meteorites.
The Osiris-Rex spacecraft has reached the asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft collected samples from the asteroid in 2020 and it has dropped its cargo on Earth September 24, 2023.

Jesuit Brother Bob Macke, a Vatican astronomer and meteorite expert, built a custom device for examining material from the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from the asteroid.
What is Osiris-Rex? The unmanned spacecraft Osiris-Rex was launched in 2016 to collect samples on the near-Earth asteroid, Bennu.

After collecting about a small sample of material in 2020, the spacecraft has reached Earth and, before it continues its space voyage to orbit the Sun, it released its cargo to send the sample back to Earth on Sept. 24. Jesuit Brother Robert Macke, in the video above, presents a device to study the porosity and density of specimens retrieved from the asteroid Bennu by the Osiris-Rex space mission at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson as seen in a YouTube video he posted on his channel.
Due to Brother Macke's renowned expertise in the field, Andrew Ryan, the lead of the mission's sample analysis working group, asked him if he could build the device needed to analyze the density and porosity of the samples to help identify the mysterious rocks on the asteroid's surface, according to Mashable.com Sept. 16.
NASA had strict requirements for this device, called a pycnometer, and the companies Ryan contacted were only willing to sell what they had in stock, not do a custom build, he told Mashable.
Brother Macke, however, was willing and he posted his progress and success with a number of videos on his YouTube channel, Macke MakerSpace. He said he built it in five weeks with the help of students at the University of Arizona, which collaborates with the Vatican Observatory's advanced technology telescope in Tucson.
He delivered the device to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston in March for a trial run. Specialists for the mission will handle the samples and the device, while Brother Macke will operate the software program he built to measure the samples' porosity and density, he said in his April 21 video.
"Our job is to examine it and to find out what's in there. We're trying to answer some basic questions like, are there more than one type of rock inside? Or is everything the same kind of rock? From what we saw on the surface of the asteroid Bennu, we expect to find two and maybe more," he said.

The results of the initial analysis, he said, "will help inform the selection of specimens for more detailed science to be done in laboratories around the world."


Source: NASA and https://mashable.com/article/osiris-rex-asteroid-sample-vatican-astronomer?

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