Get ready for an interplanetary treasure hunt.
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The world’s first asteroid sample-return spacecraft was Japan’s Hayabusa 1, which successfully brought back thousands of dust grains from the asteroid 25143 Itokawa after a seven-year space trip.
OSIRIS-REx may be the first of its kind for the NASA, but it was JAXA, the Japanese space agency that first proved sample collection from an asteroid was possible.
The spacecraft, aboard an Atlas V rocket, was rolled out to the launch pad Wednesday morning. Scientists from across the country are helping with the mission, including planetary scientists from UCF.
The Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) is an innovative machine created to observe and map an asteroid. It will use several cameras to examine the surface, a laser altimeter to map the its three-dimensional topography, visible- and infrared-light spectrometers to study its chemical and mineral composition and an X-ray spectrometer to study elemental abundances.
NASA has gone after comet dust and solar wind particles before, but never pieces of an asteroid. “We’re going out into the unknown, ” said principal scientist Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona at Tucson. Bennu is also one of the oldest known asteroids in the solar system.
The carbon-rich material is thought to date from the earliest days of the solar system.
A deep space craft is on a 4 billion mile mission to snag a sample of an asteroid. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will travel to the asteroid Bennu to analyze and gather a sample, and then return to Earth via a detachable capsule. 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 spacecraft must orbit close enough and steady enough at an average speed of 63,000 miles per hour to collect the sample.
The maneuver will be “a safe, smooth, slow high-five of that surface”, Christina Richey, deputy program scientist in Washington, said in the August briefing.
Its mission is to land on an asteroid called Bennu.
Although Bennu occupies the same approximate orbital distance from the sun, it poses little threat to Earth. If one of those asteroids brought the organic material which provided the ingredients for life here on Earth, that not only will change our understanding of this planet, but it will change our views of the probability of life on other planets as well. “It would at least be catastrophic, I’m not sure it would end all life on Earth, but it would be a bad day”, said Zolensky.
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“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.
