Bennu's sample site, before and after

What you are looking at

OSIRIS-REx touched the Nightingale site on Bennu on 20 October 2020 to collect its sample. NASA found the crater the touch left by comparing models of the ground made before and after it. Source: Bennu TAG Surface Change

NASA says the touch left a crater about 8 m (26 ft) wide, and that the spacecraft would have sunk into Bennu had it not fired its thrusters to back away. Source: Surprise Again: Asteroid Bennu Reveals Its Surface Is Like a Plastic Ball Pit

NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio published both models. NASA made the after model by moving the before model's surface by the measured height change within 7.5 m of where the sampler touched, and left the rest unchanged because the data are less accurate further away. Source: Asteroid Bennu 3D Models

NASA prepared both for 3D printing and says it adjusted their scale. Here they measure in metres: the circle NASA describes as 7.5 m measures 7.5 in them, and the before model lines up with NASA's true-scale model of the same ground at scale 1. Those checks are ours.

What you see is our reconstruction from those two models: we reduced NASA's before surface, estimated the height change at each point from nearby points in both models (medians in 10 cm cells, then smoothed), and apply it with the slider. The colours, the circle and the 5 m bar are our additions to the view.

This copy covers about 24 by 24 m around NASA's circle in 60,000 triangles, with an average edge length of about 18 cm. Nothing much smaller than that can show in it.

In this page's smoothed reconstruction, the after surface is up to about 1.0 m lower and 0.3 m higher than the before surface inside the circle. On the slider, blue marks lower ground and orange higher.

What it does not show

It is not a replay of the touch. The slider blends two surfaces; it does not show how the ground moved in time.

Nothing changes outside NASA's 7.5 m circle, because NASA applied no change there. The colours mark only lower and higher ground, not what the ground is made of. Source: Asteroid Bennu 3D Models

Up, the sides and the view from above refer to this model's display axes. This page does not identify north.

What OSIRIS-REx brought back

NASA reports that OSIRIS-REx delivered 121.6 grams of material from Bennu to Earth on 24 September 2023.