While it is a near-Earth asteroid, and crosses Earth’s orbit every six years, Grossman said, it will still take nearly two years to reach the space rock – with the probe arriving sometime in August 2018.
Advertisement
In this real life story, OSIRIS-REx will study and sample Bennu, a big, roundish space rock that has made it onto NASA’s list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids.
OCAMS: The Osiris-REX Camera Suite developed by the University of Arizona, consisting of three cameras: an 8-inch aperture telescope known as PolyCam, which will acquire Bennu from 2 million kilometers out and image it at high resolution, MapCam, which will search for out-gassing and aid with the selection of a sample site, and SamCam, which will witness and record the sampling maneuver.
NASA then named its asteroid hunter, Osiris-Rex, after an Egyptian God.
The 3,300-pound (1,500 kg) solar-powered probe is expected to take two years to reach its destination, a dark, rocky mass roughly a third of a mile wide and shaped like giant acorn orbiting the sun at roughly the same distance as Earth. The objective is to return a sample of at least 60 grams of Bennu to Earth for further study, though researchers hope to collect as much as 2 kilograms.
Because of orbital mechanics, scientists know the exact day to be waiting for it in the Utah desert: September 24, 2023.
“These treasures we get on our sample-return missions are a legacy for science, which goes far beyond the mission”, Grossman told ABC News.
“We believe that nearly all the material that was originally in the asteroid belt has either been thrown into the inner solar system or thrown out of our solar system entirely”, Thaller said. Researchers hope that Bennu, which is a particularly carbon-rich asteroid, will offer insights into the development of organic life. Others give credit to a massive proto-planetary collision.
“You can think of these asteroids as literally prebiotic chemical factories that were producing building blocks of life 4.5 billion years ago, before Earth formed, before life started here”, NASA astrobiologist Daniel Glavin said before launch.
Once OSIRIS-REx reaches the asteroid is when the real nail-biting part of the mission begins.
Lifting off at 7:05 PM local time at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Atlas V 411 configuration used a combination of liquid fuel RD-180 engine and a single solid rocket booster.
Five seconds. That’s all the spacecraft will probably need to grab a sample from the asteroid that measures 1,650 feet across. Speaking of which, JAXA’s Hayabusa 2 mission will keep Osiris-REX company in the sample return game, as it seeks to bring back material collected from 162173 Ryugu in December 2020.
Advertisement
Using a suite of cameras, lasers and spectrometers, “we are really going to understand the distribution of materials across the surface of that asteroid”, he added.
