NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft changed how we think about asteroids. Here's how.

Looking at OSIRIS-REx's target asteroid Bennu through telescopes, astronomers thought that it would be rather similar to other known space rocks. They were in for a surprise.

"When the Japanese Hayabusa 1 mission visited asteroid Itokawa, it looked exactly like what everyone's intuition said a rubble pile should look like," Kevin Walsh, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute and lead scientist of the Regolith Development Working Group of the OSIRIS-REx mission, told Space.com."It was literally just a pile of rocks in space."through telescopes, astronomers thought that the rock would be rather similar to Itokawa.

But other than that, the way the surface reflected light indicated that just like Itokawa, Bennu would be made of conglomerations of boulders interspersed with wide ponds filled with sand, on which the spacecraft could comfortably land.

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