OSIRIS-REx is set to blast off on an Atlas V rocket – the same kind that carried the New Horizons probe that visited Pluto past year – from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 7:05 p.m Eastern. It will take the spacecraft two years to traverse the 120-mile-distance between Earth and Bennu.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA’s first asteroid-sampling spacecraft was poised for an evening takeoff Thursday as crowds gathered to witness the start of its seven-year quest.
“We are basically a space vacuum cleaner”, Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, said at a NASA briefing Wednesday. Asteroids like Bennu are thought to contain natural resources like water, organic materials, and precious metals, which could one day fuel the exploration of the solar system by robotic and manned spacecraft.
Incidentally, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been made by Lockheed Martin, and will be transported on an Atlas V rocket made by United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed’s joint venture.
If all goes as planned, scientists will have in hand the dirt from Bennu in 2023, when the capsule holding the sample leaves the spacecraft and makes a parachute landing in the Utah desert.
“We’ve done the best job we can” to characterize the asteroid with telescopes, Lauretta said.
The highest probability, one in 2,500, would occur between 2175 and 2196. Study of the Bennu material could help explain whether nonbiological chemical reactions in space pushed life toward left-handed molecules or whether that shift occurred later when life arose.
The asteroid is a frequent visitor to planets in the Solar system – in October 2017 it’s expected to pass by Venus before returning to Earth in June 2020. The journey ends dramatically in 2023 when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft drops off that capsule back into the atmosphere.
From there it will be transported to the NASA space center in Houston, Texas, where the materials will be analyzed.
Osiris-Rex will hover over Bennu, according to Lauretta, as the spacecraft’s 10-foot mechanical arm touches down like a pogo stick on the surface for three to five seconds. A much larger asteroid, 2016 QA2, was spotted earlier this year coming close to 50,000 miles from Earth but the chances of an asteroid making impact is extremely low.
“Now instead of worrying about how to anchor a spacecraft to an asteroid”, said Richard Kuhns, the program manager for OSIRIS-REx at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, “in nearly no gravity, you get to gently touch it, take your sample and then back away”. Upon arrival in 2018, OSIRIS will begin an multi-year mission of mapping the 1,650-foot asteroid and bringing home a scoop of carbon-rich space rocks, which researchers believe may hold 4.5 billion-year-old leftovers from the beginning of the solar system and some of the basic building blocks of life.
JAXA launched a follow-on mission, Hayabusa 2, in December 2014. OSIRIS-REx is created to gather at least 60 grams – about 2 ounces – of material, but could bring home much more.
The European Space Agency succeeded in November 2014 to put its Philae lander on a comet, a space first.
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Like OSIRIS-REx, both missions are “PI-led”, meaning they were selected by NASA in competitions.
