Bennu for Kerbal Space Program

101955 Bennu as a real celestial body — not a stock asteroid.

⏳ Not on CKAN yet. The listing is submitted and awaiting review. Until it's merged, grab it from Releases — see Manual install.

Stock "asteroids" in KSP are Vessels. They are physics objects: they drift, they get shoved by anything that touches them, they despawn, and they cannot carry terrain, biomes or science situations. Bennu is a proper Kopernicus CelestialBody. It sits on rails, it has a PQS terrain system with colliders, thirteen named biomes, its own science text, a real orbit that crosses Kerbin's, and it renders through Parallax, PlanetShine and KerbalFX like any planet.

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Install

CKAN (recommended)

Not available through CKAN yet — the listing is awaiting review by the CKAN team. Use the manual install below in the meantime. Once it lands, this is all you'll need:

Search for Bennu and install. CKAN will pull in Kopernicus and Module Manager for you.

Manual

1. Install Kopernicus and Module Manager if you don't have them.
2. Download the latest release zip from Releases.
3. Drag the Bennu folder straight into your KSP GameData/ folder, so you end up with Kerbal Space Program/GameData/Bennu/.

That's it. Every compatibility patch is gated behind :NEEDS[…], so anything you don't have installed is skipped silently — you can install this alongside any subset of the supported mods and nothing will complain.

Requirements

KSP	1.12.x
Required	Kopernicus, Module Manager
Enhanced by	Parallax Continued, PlanetShine, KerbalFX, SCANsat, Community Resource Pack, Contract Configurator

Developed and verified against KSP 1.12.4, Kopernicus 1.12.1-244, Parallax Continued, EVE Redux 3.1.2, PlanetShine, KerbalFX, Deferred 1.3.5, SCANsat 21.1 and CRP.

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What you're flying to

	Real Bennu	This build
Mean radius	244.9 m	979.6 m (4×)
Datum radius	—	949 m
Terrain relief	—	0 – 219 m above datum
Surface gravity	8.1 × 10⁻⁵ m/s²	0.049 m/s² (0.005 g, Gilly-class)
Escape velocity	0.20 m/s	9.65 m/s
Sphere of influence	~1.7 km	65.4 km (69 × radius)
Rotation period	4.296 h	4.296 h (exact)
Geometric albedo	0.044	0.044 (exact)
Semi-major axis	1.126391 AU	1.126391 × Kerbin's SMA
Eccentricity	0.2037	0.2037 (exact)
Inclination	6.035°	6.035° (exact)

Everything is held to the real body except two deliberate departures, both explained under Design decisions.

The orbit

Bennu crosses Kerbin's orbit, exactly as the real Bennu crosses Earth's:

periapsis   12,197,619,928 m   (inside Kerbin's 13,599,840,256 m)
apoapsis    18,439,855,404 m   (outside)
period      11,002,437 s       (1.195 Kerbin years)

Transfer windows are real and infrequent, and the 6° inclination has to be dealt with. This is an intentionally awkward target to reach — that is the point of it.

The surface

Gravity here is a suggestion rather than a rule. You land at under 1 m/s, and a Kerbal jumping is thrown about 90 m up with a two-minute hang time. Escape velocity is 9.65 m/s, so an over-enthusiastic RCS burst will put your lander in orbit.

The body reflects 4.4% of the light that reaches it — darker than charcoal. The unlit side is essentially black, and solar panel output and thermals are driven by that real albedo.

The Nightingale landing site

Median slope across Bennu is 9.7°, but the top 1% is 38.8° — and under 0.049 m/s² a lander that touches down on a slope slides instead of settling. One site is prepared: Nightingale Crater, 56°N 42°E, where OSIRIS-REx actually collected its sample in October 2020. It's a 60 m dead-flat disc blended back into natural terrain over the following 80 m, cut 5.2 m into the crater floor at its deepest.

It is flat, not swept — Parallax boulders can still spawn on it, and they're collideable. Everything outside that one disc is untouched. Bennu/Configs/Bennu_Landmarks.cfg is self-contained, so delete it if you'd rather nothing on the body were prepared.

Biomes

Thirteen, using real IAU nomenclature — Bennu's features are named for birds and bird-like creatures from world mythology — plus the four OSIRIS-REx candidate sample sites:

Equatorial Ridge · Northern Hemisphere · Southern Hemisphere · North Polar Region · South Polar Region · Nightingale Crater · Osprey Crater · Kingfisher Crater · Sandpiper Crater · Benben Saxum · Roc Saxum · Gargoyle Saxum · Tlanuwa Regio

Each has its own science text and its own resource abundances.

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Resources

Bennu is a water mine, not a metal mine. That isn't a gameplay invention — it's why the real body was chosen as a mission target. It's a B-type carbonaceous asteroid, and the returned sample was dominated by hydrated clay minerals, with magnetite, iron sulfides, carbonates, phosphates and ~8.5% carbon by weight. What it never was is a differentiated body: nothing melted and sorted itself into an ore deposit, so the metals that concentrate through geological processing are largely absent.

Stock Ore plus eleven CRP resources are configured, with per-biome overrides:

	Abundance
Hydrates	8–32	hydrated phyllosilicates, the dominant mineral
Substrate / Dirt	8–30	the whole body is loose regolith
Water	6–28	the reason anyone comes here
Minerals	5–22	carbonates, phosphates
Ore	4–18
MetallicOre	3–14	magnetite, iron sulfides
Silicates, Gypsum	2–10	carbonaceous, not stony; sulfates from aqueous alteration
RareMetals	0.5–4	chondritic PGM content
ExoticMinerals	0.3–2.5
Uraninite	0.1–1.2	nearly absent — never differentiated

The biome overrides reward actually scanning before you land:

• Nightingale Crater — Water 15–45, Hydrates 18–50. The real TAG site, where OSIRIS-REx sank in far deeper than planned and hit the freshest material on the body.
• Osprey / Kingfisher / Sandpiper — elevated Water; freshly excavated subsurface.
• Polar regions — Water 12–38. Genuine cold traps; they hold what the equator loses.
• Equatorial Ridge — Substrate/Dirt up to 40. Centrifugal migration piles mobile fines here; it's what built the ridge in the first place.
• Tlanuwa Regio and the saxa — MetallicOre and RareMetals up, Substrate down to 1–5. Bare rock, nothing loose to scoop.

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Mod compatibility

All patches live in Bennu/Compatibility/ and are gated behind :NEEDS[…].

Parallax Continued

Full terrain shader, scaled-space shader, and a four-tier boulder scatter system (gravel → cobbles → boulders → saxa) with colliders on the larger tiers. Densities are set far above Gilly's on purpose: "there is nowhere flat to put a lander" is the single most characteristic fact about Bennu's real surface.

Detail textures and rock models are referenced from Parallax's own stock texture packs (Gilly's set — dark, airless, angular rock, the closest match already installed). Nothing is copied or redistributed; the paths just have to resolve. Bennu's much darker carbonaceous colour comes from its own vertex colour map, which Parallax blends over those details. Scaled space (map view and the tracking station) runs in Baked mode, not the FromTerrain mode every stock body uses. FromTerrain composites the terrain detail textures over the colour map out there too — and since this pack borrows Gilly's detail set for a body considerably darker than Gilly, that borrowed rock ended up supplying most of Bennu's albedo, rendering it washed out and waxy. Baked draws the colour, normal and height maps directly, so the body shows the albedo it was authored with and shows the same one at every distance. On a stock body the two modes look alike, because a body's colour map and its own detail textures are of similar brightness.

PlanetShine

Intensity is derived from real albedo rather than eyeballed: Mun is 0.12 albedo at intensity 1.0, so Bennu at 0.044 gets 0.37. A craft on the night side receives almost no fill light, which is correct.

KerbalFX

RoverDust and ImpactPuffs are both configured, with an explicit near-black dust tint that overrides the biome map — Bennu's biome colours are distinct markers for Kopernicus, not surface colours, so left alone KerbalFX would throw up bright orange dust in Benben Saxum.

Impact puffs are turned up 1.4×, because OSIRIS-REx sank half a metre into this surface during sample collection and threw up a debris cloud far larger than anyone predicted.

SCANsat

Altimetry range is rescaled to 0–240 m using Moho's mercury palette. On SCANsat's defaults every pixel of Bennu's 0–219 m relief lands in the bottom 2.5% of the palette and the map renders as one flat colour — complete, and useless. Per-resource display cutoffs are set for all twelve resources to match the abundances above.

Contract Configurator

Three contracts retracing OSIRIS-REx, in sequence: survey Bennu from orbit, touch down at Nightingale and collect science there, then recover that science on Kerbin. The second one drops a navigation waypoint on the prepared landing site.

They have no deadlines. Bennu's transfer windows are rare and its period is 1.2 Kerbin years, so any deadline generous enough to be fair is long enough to be meaningless, and a tight one would fail you for orbital mechanics you don't control. Rewards are tuned against stock outer-planet contracts and are the first thing to change if they don't suit your economy — nothing else in the pack depends on them.

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Design decisions

Two things deliberately depart from the real body.

Scale (4×). At true size a Kerbal walking exceeds escape velocity, landing legs never settle, and the SOI is barely seven body-radii wide. 4× with Gilly-class gravity keeps it recognisably a small asteroid while making it somewhere you can actually operate. Raising gravity to 0.005 g at this size implies an unphysical density; that is the trade being made, and it only affects the mass, not anything you see.

If you want the true, brutal version, set geeASL = 0.0000083 in Configs/Bennu.cfg.

Rotation direction. Real Bennu is a retrograde rotator (obliquity 177.6°). KSP has no axial tilt for celestial bodies, so there is no correct way to express that, and this spins prograde with the correct period. A negative rotationPeriod is the usual suggestion for reversing spin; it's untested here and touches enough of KSP's rotation handling that it ships positive, with the alternative sitting commented out one line below in Bennu.cfg.

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How the body was made

There is no hand-painted art in this pack. The shape model and all four maps are generated procedurally and deterministically by the tools in Tools/, which need nothing but Windows PowerShell 5.1 and .NET Framework.

A spinning-top base shape, plus fBm lumpiness, ridged mid-scale facets, fine roughness, and a 260-crater population sampled from a bounded power law with bowl, rim-crest and ejecta profiles. All noise is sampled in 3D on the sphere, so there are no antimeridian seams and no polar pinching.

powershell -File Tools/Generate-BennuMaps.ps1

The map-view node icon is generated too — a flat-poled diamond drawn to the same shape law as the body, so reshaping the body reshapes the icon:

powershell -File Tools/Generate-BennuIcon.ps1

Every seed is fixed, so a re-run reproduces identical bytes. There is also a validator that checks the whole pack — brace balance, live reflection of every config key against your installed Kopernicus.dll, texture path resolution, byte-exact biome colour matching in both directions, derived physics, and the terrain slope distribution measured off the shipped height map:

powershell -File Tools/Validate-Bennu.ps1

Full detail on the generation pipeline, the validator, and what flight testing changed is in docs/TECHNICAL.md.

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Known limits

• Flight-tested twice, with fixes applied afterward but not yet re-flown. Scatter density is the value most likely to still want tuning — it was cut hard and deliberately errs sparse. spawnChance in Bennu_Parallax_Scatters.cfg is the single knob.
• Scaled space has been measured, but the fix has not been flown. Frame captures of map view showed the lit face at a flat ~100/255 against a colour map averaging 64.7/255, with no blown-out pixels anywhere — too bright and too uniform, not glossy. The cause was the detail-texture compositing described above, plus _Hapke at 0.6. Scaled space is now Baked with _Hapke 0.30, and Tools/Validate-Bennu.ps1 section 9 fails the build if the two ever drift back. It has not yet been looked at in-game.
• Prograde rotation, for the reason above.
• No custom rock models. Boulders reuse Gilly's meshes. They're good meshes and Bennu's real boulders are angular dark rubble, so it reads well, but they aren't Bennu-specific.
• contractWeight is left at default, so stock generated contracts may target Bennu about as often as any other body despite being much harder to reach. Lower it in Bennu.cfg if that bothers you. The three Contract Configurator contracts are separate and unaffected by it.
• The contracts are unflown. Every type name, key and biome reference is checked against the installed Contract Configurator assembly by the validator, but no one has yet played the chain end to end.
• Resource abundances aren't balanced against any particular economy. They're set from real composition and against stock Ore's 1–15 baseline, not tuned against Kerbalism, MiningExpansion or WildBlue converter chains.
• If you retune Bennu_Resources.cfg, retune the SCANsat cutoffs to match. The validator will tell you the two files disagree, but it can't know what you intended.

Troubleshooting

Bennu looks wrong in map view or the tracking station after I changed something. Delete Bennu/Cache/Bennu.bin and let Kopernicus rebuild it. (With Parallax Continued installed that folder stays empty, which is expected — Parallax displaces a dense uniform sphere from the height map instead of using a PQS-baked mesh.)

The night side and shadowed crater floors look like grey haze instead of near-black. Something in your install is lifting ambient light. Bennu reflects 4.4% of incident light, so ambient lift shows on it far more than on anything else. If you run Deferred, its global ambientBrightness defaults to 0.9 — drop it to 0.5–0.7 via Ctrl+Alt+D.

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Credits and licence

Made by CritZitGaming.

Shape, colour, normal and biome maps are original procedural work. Boulder meshes and terrain detail textures are referenced from Parallax Continued's stock texture packs at runtime and are not redistributed here. Real Bennu data — shape, rotation, albedo, orbit, surface nomenclature and composition — comes from NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission and the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.

Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. You may share and adapt this pack for non-commercial purposes with credit, and derivatives must carry the same licence.