NASA launched a Lockheed Martin-built spacecraft Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard a United Launch Alliance rocket on a mission to explore and collect a sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
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Lifting off at 7:05 p.m. from Space Launch Complex 41 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the rocket’s launch was timed to put the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, on an exact course to reach the asteroid Bennu in August 2018.
“You’ll all be real glad to know that we got everything just exactly ideal”, Lauretta said at a news conference later in the day.
Professor Dante Lauretta said everything had gone to plan.
“We’re very excited about what this mission can tell us about the origin of our solar system, and we celebrate the bigger picture of science that is helping us make discoveries and accomplish milestones that might have been science fiction yesterday, but are science facts today”, said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “We’re going to be answering some of the most fundamental questions that NASA really focuses on”.
“For primitive, carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu, materials are preserved from over four and a half billion years ago”, explained Christina Richey, OSIRIS-REx deputy program scientist at NASA.
“We expect these samples will contain organic molecules from the early solar system that may give us information and clues to the origin of life”, he said. If the scientists get hands on an uncontaminated sample from one of these asteroids, they would be able to analyze it on Earth and get much more precise results than could be gleaned by spacecraft-based instrument.
Then, in July 2020, the spacecraft will touch the asteroid for only three seconds to collect at least 60 grams of loose rocks and dust using a device called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism and store the material in a sample return capsule.
But OSIRIS-REx won’t land. This will be delivered in a capsule that will be parachuted down to the Utah desert on 24 September 2023.
In earlier NASA missions, tiny samples of a comet and atoms collected from the solar wind have been taken and returned to Earth.
JAXA’s Hayabusa spacecraft crash-landed into the surface of its target asteroid and managed to return a few micrograms of material in 2010.
The 6.2 metre long spacecraft will now orbit the sun for a year before using the Earth’s gravity to assist its journey to Bennu, which at its furthest away point is 211 million miles away from the Earth.
Bennu, with a diameter of 492 meters, is classified as a potentially hazardous object, with a 1 in 2700 chance of impacting Earth in the 22nd century. Lauretta said its orbit has changed by over 160 km due to the Yarkovsky effect since it was discovered in 1999.
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Members of the OSIRIS-REx team celebrate the NASA spacecraft’s successful launch on September 8, 2016.
