“We seek samples that date back to the very dawn of our solar system”, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said during a news conference, according to Space.com.
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Technicians are putting the final touches on a spacecraft heading to a near earth asteroid.
The Hayabusa mission encountered some difficulties, and even crash-landed into the surface of its target, but managed to return just under a milligram of material from the asteroid Itokawa in 2010.
During the mission, OSIRIS-REx also will study how heating by the sun helps propel small asteroids, a process essential to accurately predicting their trajectories.
The TAGSAM will now be used in the asteroid mission, created to collect at least 60 grams o 2.1 ounces.
That statement was announcing that they would soon be releasing a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) related to the asteroid mission, meaning that they will be looking for scientific research proposals.
The idea is not to land on the asteroid, but approach closely and “high-five” it for several seconds to gather some debris that can be studied more closely back on Earth. The mission will collect dust from Bennu to determine how carbon and ice landed on our planet, revealing the origins of life on Earth. “We think those organic molecules were critical for the formation of life on our planet”, Lauretta said during a press briefing Saturday on the OSIRIS REx mission, at Kennedy Space Center.
“We are talking about the start of the formation of our solar system”, she said.
The mission is set to launch on Thursday, September 8th at 7:05 EDT from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
OSIRIS-REx will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on an Atlas V 411 rocket during a 34-day launch period starting September 8, 2016. After a careful survey of Bennu to characterize the asteroid and locate the most promising sample sites, OSIRIS-REx will collect between 2 and 70 ounces of surface material with its robotic arm and return the sample to Earth via a detachable capsule in 2023. For two years after the sample return (from late 2023-2025) the science team will catalog the sample and conduct the analysis needed to meet the mission science goals.
Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) – An articulated robotic arm with a sampler head, provided by Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, to collect a sample of Bennu’s surface.
A spacecraft is going to take a flight to a close by asteroid known asBennu, study it with the help of its exterior with pictures and other technology, and then will fly over it to use a vacuum-like device for sample collection to bring it back down on our planet. It is believed that asteroids brought to Earth the elements that created life, and the agency is determined to look into it.
In three weeks, NASA plans to launch its first-ever OSIRIS-REx asteroid-sampling mission.
OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer (OTES) – an instrument provided by Arizona State University in Tempe that will provide mineral and temperature information by observing the thermal infrared spectrum.
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“These were there when the solar system first formed”, said Dr. Amy Simon from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
