Bennu may also harbor organic material from the young solar system. Some of those planetesimals were prevented from assembling by Jupiter’s gravity and today they form a band of smaller objects beyond Mars that we call the asteroid belt. “We’ll analyze the changes in temperature with time, and that’s going to tell us the thermal inertia of the surface – how quickly or slowly the surface cools off”.
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“It’s the next major step in getting to the launch pad”, said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator with the University of Arizona. Once a sample is brought back “then we’ll be able to answer the question definitively”.
According to Green, the US spacecraft dubbed as OSIRIS-REx will be launched on September 8 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
-Sept. 24, 2023: Finally free of Osiris-Rex, which will continue to orbit the sun, the sample container re-enters the atmosphere at more than 27,000 miles per hour (43,450 kph). “There’s a lot of things we expect to be surprised about”.
But we’ve got a long way to go: After launching Thursday, OSIRIS will spend about a year orbiting the sun.
Bennu is one of many near-Earth asteroids that occasionally cross paths with our planet. In fact, that’s one of the very reasons it was chosen as a target.
The asteroid called 2016 QL44 was only discovered earlier this year and has been monitored by NASA and other agencies ever since because of the uncertain orbit.
“Asteroids get hot”, explained Beshore, “like how asphalt streets get hot on the Earth”. “We’ve done the best job we can” to characterize the asteroid with telescopes, Lauretta said. The mission’s objective is to collect at least two ounces of material, which will return to Earth in 2023. How it will accomplish this collection is one of the trickiest aspects of the mission.
The detailed maps will help scientists understand more about the part of the asteroid that their sample comes from, she said. From that first map, they will identify a dozen or so potential sampling sites, then create even more refined maps to choose the spot most likely for success.
“We essentially will be weighing the asteroid to see how the mass is distributed within it”, University of Colorado professor Daniel Scheeres, the team leader for the mission’s radio science team, said in the statement.
Scientists hope the sample return mission will reveal a new understanding of the ingredients that make up the solar system, as well as help develop defenses against interloping asteroids. It’s not just a simple scoop, though. The robotic arm can release a blast of nitrogen gas that can dislodge tiny particles, forcing them into a chamber.
This is not the first mission to bring an asteroid sample to Earth. Neither is vacuuming samples off an asteroid. “We’ve got an extensive suite of cameras, we’ve got our laser altimeter from the Canadian Space Agency, the spectrometers and the spacecraft itself”, Lauretta said.
We also collected 440,000 names from well-wishers that wanted to symbolically join the seven-year mission. The spacecraft will take the dirt most of the way back, but it’s not equipped for a landing.
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“There’s just so much unknown about the surface of the asteroid that the idea that you could develop a harpoon or anchoring system or use hold-down thrusters to keep you on the surface was deemed too high a risk for the program”, he said.
