The craft won’t rendezvous with the asteroid until 2018. “We’re going to be answering some of the most fundamental questions that NASA works on”.
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“Today, we celebrate a huge milestone for this remarkable mission, and for this mission team”, said Charles Bolden, Administrator of NASA.
University of Arizona professor Dante Lauretta, principal investigator on OSIRIS-REx, started tracking Bennu in 1999.
You can follow the mission on Twitter.
Scientists believe asteroids and comets crashing into early Earth delivered water and organic compounds that seeded the planet for life.
The sample could provide study material for generations.
A rocket launch scheduled for 7:05 p.m. Thursday from Cape Canaveral is a mission unlike any other, with the rocket carrying a spacecraft bound for an asteroid.
Once the spacecraft is near Bennu, it will deploy an instrument, not unlike a vacuum cleaner, to suck up samples from the asteroid’s surface, Bazley said.
Osiris-Rex launched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 8:04 pm last night.
“We really want to understand this phenomenon, so that we can better understand asteroid Bennu and apply that understanding to all asteroids not only in near-earth space but throughout our solar system”, he said.
In July 2020, the spacecraft will manoeuvre its 11ft arm to reach out and will try to collect at least 60g of small rocks and dust from the surface of Bennu.
NASA hopes OSIRIS-REx will bring back the largest payload of space samples since the Apollo era of the 1960s and 1970s, when American explorers collected and carried back to Earth some 800 pounds (360kg) of moon rocks.
It all goes as planned, OSIRIS-REx will return to Earth on September 24, 2023.
A research spacecraft with Colorado fingerprints all over it successfully launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida Thursday evening, starting a seven-year, 4.4 billion mile mission to chase down and study an asteroid named Bennu. Drake, who was the director of the LPL, died in September 2011, just four months after NASA officially selected the OSIRIS-REx mission.
United Launch Alliance is a private partnership between Lockheed and Boeing.
Bennu, which is bigger than the Empire State Building, also has a “relatively high probability” of impacting Earth in the late 22nd Century, according to NASA, so OSIRIS-REx could uncover information that might help the planet out should the unthinkable happen.
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While an important mission for NASA, this won’t be the first time that humanity has captured rocks and dust from space.
