The $1 billion spacecraft, called OSIRIS-REx, blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Thursday evening aboard an Atlas V rocket.
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft – the agency’s first-ever asteroid sampling return mission – has launched on September 8, carrying a suite of instruments that will help study an asteroid’s surface.
That extraterrestrial rendezvous will see the probe essentially vacuum up a bit of Bennu’s surface and fly it back home to Earth, where it can then be studied for years to come, one of the mission’s leading scientists told ABC News. Scientists suspect that asteroids may have been a source of the water and organic molecules for the early Earth and other planetary bodies.
OSIRIS-REx will make a swing by Earth next year to gain a gravity assist that will accelerate it even faster to reach Bennu, where it will eventually go into orbit.
Bennu is next expected to pass by Earth in 2135, when it will pass just inside the moon’s orbit, and this close approach will change Bennu’s orbit, and scientists say that could cause it to impact Earth sometime between 2175 and 2199.
Once orbiting the asteroid, OSIRIS-REx will spend two years surveying it in unprecedented detail.
Nasa has sent a spacecraft chasing after an unexplored asteroid, in the hope that it might one day keep us from being destroyed. Though the sample will be small – only a couple of pounds at most – it will be a time capsule of sorts recording our solar system’s creation.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University professor Justin Karl said seeing OSIRIS-REx launch reminds people that space is still about exploring – especially as SpaceX and ULA launch more frequently from Florida. Since Bennu’s discovery in 1999, this “heat thruster” action has shifted the space rock’s position in space by more than 100 miles (160 km), Lauretta said.
This is the first mission of it’s kind for NASA. The solar-powered spacecraft will then study Bennu from orbit for almost two years using five different science instruments. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft. Join us in a conversation about world events, the newsgathering process or whatever aspect of the news universe you find interesting or important. Moreover, REXIS will also help determine the best possible location the spacecraft’s robotic arm can reach out to and collect a sample. The odds are less than one-tenth of 1 percent, according to Lauretta.
Yesterday the NASA Osiris-Rex mission launched without a hitch. The mother spacecraft, meanwhile, will continue its orbit of the sun.
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Scientists selected Bennu in 2008 for the mission because it met several criteria – flight-path stability and proximity to Earth, size and speed of rotation, and an unaltered, carbon-rich composition. Most famously, astronauts lugged more than 800 lbs. It will be seven years before it returns to Earth with its bounty.
