The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) successfully launched the Atlas 5 rocket that will carry the satellite, Osiris-Rex (The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer), on its billion dollar seven year, 9 billion mile round-trip voyage to the asteroid Bennu, named after a bird in Egyptian mythology.
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Osiris-Rex will hover like a hummingbird over Bennu, according to Mr Lauretta, as the spacecraft’s 10ft mechanical arm touches down like a pogo stick on the surface for three to five seconds.
“Three-quarters of the sample will be set aside for future researchers – for the science questions we haven’t figured out to even ask yet”, said Gordon Johnston, an OSIRIS-REx program executive at NASA headquarters.
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. OSIRIS-REx will then head back to Earth and deliver the sample in September 2023 where it will be studied at #NASA’s Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston, where the original moon rocks were taken decades ago. “It was an fantastic evening for me and for this team”.
Therefore, this is “a journey that could revolutionize our understanding of the early solar system”, NASA said in a statement.
Bennu is listed as one of the potentially hazardous asteroids that may impact the Earth in the coming years.
But OSIRIS-REx won’t land.
An uncontaminated asteroid sample from a known source would enable precise analyses, providing results far beyond what can be achieved by spacecraft-based instruments or by studying meteorites. Instead, it will eject a small capsule containing the asteroid sample, which will land with the help of parachutes at the Utah Test and Training Range, southwest of Salt Lake City.
In earlier NASA missions, tiny samples of a comet and atoms collected from the solar wind have been taken and returned to Earth. Once in close proximity to the asteroid, the explorer will spend roughly two years mapping out the space rock to determine the best area to pull a sample from. The rock is a sort of time-capsule that holds material dating back to the origins of the Solar System. The asteroid also has a 1 in 2700 chance of hitting the Earth sometime 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.
“We will make discoveries on this mission that we have not anticipated”.
Yesterday the NASA Osiris-Rex mission launched without a hitch.
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It is not the first such sample-return mission – the Japanese brought back a tiny amount of dust from asteroid Itokawa in 2010.
