“We were able to deliver OSIRIS-REx on time and under budget to the launch site, and will soon do something that no other NASA spacecraft has done – bring back a sample from an asteroid”. Its Atlas V/Centaur rocket performed perfectly, sending the spacecraft on a two-year journey to the asteroid Bennu.
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Bennu (pronounced BEN-yu) is quite small – just 492 meters (1,614 feet) in diameter.
OSIRIS-REx, which is now on its way into a heliocentric orbit, is created to rendezvous with, study, and return a sample of the asteroid Bennu to Earth.
“Tonight is a night for celebration”. The spacecraft will depart as early as March 2021 and return its sample capsule to Earth in September 2025.
In the meantime, Dr. Daly said he’s looking forward to something even more exciting than seeing OSIRIS-REx lift off: the first close-ups of Bennu.
Osiris-Rex is fitted with a device called an infrared spectrometer.
In 2135, Bennu is expected to pass just slightly within the moon’s orbit, a “particularly close approach (that) will change Bennu’s orbit by a small amount, which is uncertain at this time and which may lead to a potential impact on Earth sometime between 2175 and 2199”, NASA said.
Computer simulations at the University of Arizona will replicate landings on various surfaces, in preparation for OSIRIS-REx’s brief interaction with the ball of ice and rock.
NASA has gone after comet dust and solar wind particles before, but never pieces of an asteroid.
It “is flying free on its way to a seven year mission to rendez vous with the asteroid Bennu and return a sample to Earth”.
“We are really going to understand the distribution of materials across the surface of that asteroid”, he said. Osiris-Rex’s bounty should surpass that – Mr Lauretta and his team want at least 60 grammes of dust and gravel when the big day comes in 2020. Many astronomers theorize Bennu may have provided Earth with some of the ingredients crucial to the development of life.
In 2010, a Japanese mission also brought back a sample – a tiny one – from an asteroid.
NASA on Thursday evening launched a space probe called OSIRIS-REx to chase down a dark, potentially unsafe asteroid called Bennu. The return phase requires the firing of the MR-107 thrusters to leave Bennu with a speed of 716 miles per hour, placing OSIRIS-REx on a ballistic trajectory that intersects the orbit of the Earth in September 2023. The mother spacecraft, meanwhile, will continue its orbit of the sun. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the agency’s New Frontiers Program for its Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Unlike the meteorites that hit the Earth and offer scientists a tantalizing but flawed look at these interplanetary building blocks, Bennu’s material is pristine, unaffected by atmospheres or contaminated by biology.
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Bennu – which was named by a 9-year-old contest victor, Michael Puzio of North Carolina, who thought OSIRIS-REx resembled the Egyptian drawings of a heron – is thought to harbor carbon organic molecules, the building blocks of life.
