The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer spacecraft was launched into space through the 189-foot-tall Atlas V rocket spacecraft to begin making its way to asteroid Bennu.
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The United Launch Alliance booster lifted off at 7.05pm (local time) on Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
United Launch Alliance is a private partnership between Lockheed and Boeing.
The robotic spacecraft took off on top of an Atlas Five rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida in the early hours of the morning.
“You’ll all be real glad to know that we got everything just exactly flawless”, said Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It was an incredible evening for me and for this team”.
“You can think of these asteroids as literally prebiotic chemical factories that were producing building blocks of life 4.5 billion years ago, before Earth formed, before life started here”, NASA astrobiologist Daniel Glavin said before launch.
“Tonight is a night for celebration, we are on the way to an asteroid”, said Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist.
“We will make discoveries on this mission that we have not anticipated”.
“Planetary science, for me, is where it’s at”, he said.
The launch came 50 years to the day that the first “Star Trek” episode aired on TV. “It’s a seven-year mission to boldly go to asteroid Bennu and back”.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft contains an extensive complement of propulsion equipment to accomplish this first-ever sample return from an asteroid for NASA, and all of the rocket engines on the spacecraft are provided by Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Only one other spacecraft, Japan’s Hayabusa, has previously returned samples from an asteroid to Earth, but due to a series of problems it collected less than a milligram of material. Thrusters will shoot out nitrogen gas to stir up the surface, and the loose particles will be sucked up into the device.
It will orbit the nearest asteroid and map it out with a thermal image spectrometer – or OTES – designed by ASU, where it will find the best place to land and collect samples of dirt and rock and then return to earth.
“With today’s successful launch, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft embarks on a journey of exploration to Bennu”, said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Learning more about the origins of life and the beginning of the solar system are key objectives for the SUV-sized OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer.
The $800 million mission will travel to Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid about the size of a small mountain.
“It’s satisfying to see the culmination of years of effort from this outstanding team”, said Mike Donnelly, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The odds are less than one-tenth of 1 percent, according to Lauretta.
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Aerojet Rocketdyne propulsion is involved in every phase of the mission, including the Earth-departure phase to fine tune the Earth escape velocity; the cruise phase to adjust trajectory and ensure a perfectly accurate trajectory for the Earth swing-by and arrival at Bennu.
