OSIRIS-Rex Nightingale site
The Nightingale region of the asteroid Bennu, with an outline of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft superimposed for scale. OSIRIS-REx will attempt to collect samples from that area in August 2020 for return to Earth.

NASA announced Dec. 12 that it has selected the site on a near Earth asteroid where a spacecraft will touch down and collect samples, a task that has become more difficult than mission planners originally expected.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...