-August 2018: Osiris-Rex arrives at Bennu. The solar arrays deployed and are now powering the spacecraft.
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“We are basically a space vacuum cleaner”, Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, said at a NASA briefing Wednesday.
Bennu was chosen from the some 500,000 asteroids in the solar system because it orbits close to Earth’s path around the sun.
On Thursday, during a live launch broadcast in an apparent nod to “Star Trek”, which has completed its 50 years, NASA spokesman Mike Curie said announced OSIRIS-Rex liftoff, its seven-year mission to approach Bennu asteroid and return back with its pieces.
NASA’s robotic asteroid hunter, Osiris-Rex, is created to scoop up pebbles and rock the size of gravel – anywhere from one to four or even five handfuls in a single swipe.
With lift-off taking place in Cape Canaveral, not too far from the site of SpaceX’s exploded rocket, there was some concern that residual damage from the destroyed rocket could delay OSIRIS-REx’s trip up today.
“We got everything just exactly flawless”, Lauretta, who’s based at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), said during a postlaunch news conference Thursday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
NASA hopes to collect between 60g and 2kg of material, which should return to Earth in 2023.
The asteroid, named Bennu, was chose because of its composition, size, and proximity to Earth.
Scientists are aiming to collect about 60 grams of material, but they have the trunk space for as much as 2 kilograms. “This is going to be a treasure trove of material for scientists yet to come”.
“We would need probably at least five years warning to 10 years warning to be able to launch an effective space mission to deflect that object”, Johnson said. We therefore can get a better view into the past of our own planet by studying an asteroid, than by studying the rocks we actually find here.
In March 2021 OSIRIS-Rex will begin its return journey to Earth and by 2023 the capsule containing the space rock will land gently in the Utah desert. The acronym spells the name of the Egyptian god Osiris.
“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 to the press before launch.
Japan already has visited an asteroid and returned some specks (the mission didn’t go quite as planned), and is chasing yet another space rock for even more samples.
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Scientists over at NASA are hoping to get some information from the mission which cost around US$1 billion.
