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Volume 568 Issue 7750, 4 April 2019

Rough guide

The cover shows the first image of the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu taken by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The mission ultimately aims to collect samples from the asteroid’s surface, but the initial view of Bennu suggests this may be a trickier task than anticipated. In this issue, Dante Lauretta and his co-authors present early observations of Bennu’s properties. They find that the bulk composition of the asteroid seems to be hydrated and volatile-rich, as was expected. But the imaging reveals that Bennu’s surface is far rockier than was predicted, giving the sample-retrieval mission only a small number of apparently hazard-free regions, some 5–20 metres in extent, that could be safely targeted. 

Cover image: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

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