May 13, 2019

This last week was Week 3 of Detailed Survey: Equatorial Stations phase. For each week of this phase, the spacecraft will observe Bennu from a different Local Solar Time (LST) station. At each station, the spacecraft will be centered on the equator at a distance of 5 km and will observe the asteroid for one full Bennu rotation (4.3 hours).

On May 9, the spacecraft took observations from Station 3, located at 12:30 pm LST, with OVIRS, OTES, MapCam, and OLA. These observations contribute to the OVIRS and OCAMS photometric models, global spectral, temperature and thermal inertia maps, and the global shape models from SPC (35-cm) and OLA (75 cm).

On May 11, OTES observed Bennu in a series of east-west zig-zag scans to provide data for the thermal emission phase function. OVIRS took ride along scans and MapCam took context images.