May 20, 2019

This last week was Week 4 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 16, the spacecraft took observations from Station 4, located at 10:00 am LST. The 10:00 am station is the prime station for OVIRS observations. The team is operating OVIRS in a special high-resolution mode to get the best possible information about the mineralogy and organic composition of the surface for sample site selection. MapCam and OTES also took observations with OLA scanning in ride-along mode. 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).

Immediately following Station 4, 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.