It’s the start of the seven-year OSIRIS-REx mission (the initials stand for “Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer”, because NASA never met an overly elaborate acronym it didn’t like) to survey the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
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NASA launched its first ever mission to reach and study an asteroid up close Thursday, in what they call a “huge milestone” in working to understand the origins of the solar system.
OSIRIS-REx is now chasing down a 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid named Bennu, on a seven-year mission to snag samples of the space rock and send the material back to Earth.
“We believe that the composition of the asteroid has perhaps organic material, it has perhaps a significant amount of water, those are the things that were delivered to Earth early on”, said Jim Green, NASA’s planetary division director. The probe is now embarked on its way on a almost two-year voyage to the asteroid Bennu.
Bennu, which completes an orbit of the sun every 1.2 years, comes within 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) of the Earth every six years, making it one of the most accessible “near-Earth objects” (NEOs), according to NASA.
Osiris-Rex may lead to asteroid-mining missions, according to scientists, and could help protect the planet from menacing space rocks.
It’ll take the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft two years to get to the asteroid and another two years before it can land and collect samples. “We’re going to be answering some of the most fundamental questions that NASA works on”, said Dr. Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist.
Professor Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principle investigator, said similar material on Earth has long since been erased.
“With today’s successful launch, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft embarks on a journey of exploration to Bennu”. It will then travel for another 2.5 years on a trajectory towards Earth, where it is expected to land at a NASA facility in Utah in September 2023.
The last time the agency launched a major sampling mission, Richard Nixon was president and “The Brady Bunch” was in its first season.
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Scientists have previously studied pieces of asteroids for decades in the form of meteorites, but all of them were quickly contaminated when they fell to Earth, Lauretta said, noting that the sample returned from a primitive asteroid would enable precise analyses that can’t be duplicated on the ground. It’ll spend some time orbiting Bennu carefully mapping and studying the asteroid’s surface to choose the best sample site. The craft won’t rendezvous with the asteroid until 2018.
