NASA Starts Building Asteroid-Bound Spacecraft

NASA gave the go-ahead to start construction of the first asteroid-bound spacecraft on Wednesday, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida during the Fall of 2016.

OSIRIS-REx will land on an asteroid named Bennu, which comes close to Earth in 2018. The spacecraft will spend a year exploring the asteroid, and will bring about two ounces of soil samples back to Earth.

Dante Lauretta, a planetary science professor at the University of Arizona who is serving as principal investigator for the mission, told Mashable that there has already been a decade's worth of planning just to get to the point where they were ready to build the spacecraft, and that the timeline from here on out is "perfect." Read more...