Asteroids like Bennu may have delivered water, carbon, and other substances crucial to life to the early Earth.
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If everything goes as planned, a minivan-sized robot, moving oh-so-slowly, will lightly graze the asteroid in mid-2018.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to orbit, map and collect samples from near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
A small asteroid was located close to the Earth’s atmosphere passing a mere 23,900 miles from our planet according to NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) program. This dirt could hold the key to answering some of our biggest questions about the universe, such as where we came from, and why we exist.
“I’m really keen on getting the sample back, having it be pristine and getting to really understand fundamentals of our solar system”, Richey says. The OSIRIS-REx will leave Bennu in March 2021 and reach Earth during September 2023, after two and a half years of travel.
The OSIRIS-REx mission will be the first of its kind for the U.S. Also, in 2006, in 2006, NASA’s Stardust missions cooped up ancient dust from a comet.
But the mission will take a lot of time – seven years to be more precise.
If OSIRIS-Rex succeeds, it will not only bring home the largest asteroid sample ever.
Don’t panic just yet, there’s a 99% chance that won’t happen, but either way it’s good to keep an eye on it, and the mission will give us a better understanding of its trajectory.
“So, we’ll have over 20 years of very precise tracking data on this asteroid”, says Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and the principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx.
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The asteroid Bennu is about 1,600 feet across, about twice the height of Boston’s John Hancock Tower.
