NASA

Simurgh Saxum and 11 other features on the asteroid are the first to receive official Bennu feature names approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features.

Simurgh Saxum is named for the benevolent, mythological bird in Persian mythology. The Simurgh was said to possess all knowledge, and Simurgh Saxum defines the prime meridian on Bennu and is the basis for the asteroid’s coordinate system.

The accepted names were proposed by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx team members, who have been mapping the asteroid in detail over the last year. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, is currently visiting the asteroid and is scheduled to collect a sample from Bennu’s surface this summer.

When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu in December 2018, its close-up images confirmed what mission planners had predicted nearly two decades before: Bennu is made of loose material weakly clumped together by gravity, and shaped like a spinning top >>>