The 500-meter-wide space rock (just over the size of the Empire State Building) was, “very carefully chosen because it’s going to help us achieve many of our planetary goals”, chief of which, he said, is “to better understand the origin of the solar system”.
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OSIRIS-REx, short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification-Regolith Explorer, should reach the near-Earth asteroid by 2018. It will then start a long return trip to Earth and is scheduled to arrive September 2023. For two years it will chase the asteroid.
The OSIRIS-REx mission will be flying 4.5 billion miles (7.2 billion kilometers) to reach the asteroid and bring back some material from the rock surface. Osiris-Rex will return to orbit the Earth, releasing the sample to return to the planet by parachute to a Utah landing site in December 2020.
The OSIRIS-REx launch went off without a hitch.
OSIRIS-REx separated from its United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 8:04 p.m. NASA has confirmed that the solar arrays have deployed and are now powering the spacecraft.
“We’re going to get to asteroid Bennu and we’re going to map this brand new world that we’ve never seen before”, said Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator.
NASA has successfully launched OSIRIS-Rex, a seven-year mission to collect samples from an asteroid.
Only one other spacecraft, Japan’s Hayabusa, has previously returned samples from an asteroid to Earth, but it collected less than a milligram of material because of a series of problems.
Thousands gathered to witness the evening launch of Osiris-Rex from Florida’s Cape Canaveral.
NASA recently launched its first mission into space to sample asteroids from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The OSIRIS-Rex mission is set to provide information about the solar system. The University of Arizona leads the science team and observation planning and processing. He was accompanied by 12-year-old Mike Puzio at NASA’s nearby Kennedy Space Center (KSC).
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Nasa’s researchers plan to spend two years cataloguing and analysing the sample before giving 75 per cent of it to the Johnson Space Flight Centre in Houston. Once every six years it comes within 300,000 kilometres of our planet and in 2135 it will pass between the moon and the Earth. Delivery of the precious asteroid pieces – which may hold clues to the origin of life on Earth – won’t be until 2023. NASA estimates that there is a one-in-2,700 chance that Bennu might hit Earth sometime between 2175 and 2199.
