NASA launched its campaign #ToBennuAndBack to highlight this one-of-a-kind mission of OSIRIS-REx, collecting space rock samples of non-Earth origin.
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That sample will be studied by researchers across the globe, and will hopefully give us clues about the formation of the solar system and other asteroids near Earth.
The spacecraft will spend the first two years of its journey traveling to near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
This has only been done once before: In 2005, the Japanese space agency JAXA landed a craft on an asteroid and retrieved a dust sample from the surface.
A research spacecraft with Colorado fingerprints all over it successfully launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida Thursday evening, starting a seven-year, 4.4 billion mile mission to chase down and study an asteroid named Bennu.
OSIRIS-REx separated from its United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 8:04 p.m.
It will take years for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to reach its destination.
“Today, we celebrate a huge milestone for this remarkable mission and mission team, as we probe the origin of our solar system”.
Inside the developing solar system, small rocky bodies were beginning to form, many of them studded with water ice and organic materials, which are key compounds that may have made Earth habitable or even given life its start, Lauretta said.
“We are going out into the unknown”, he said.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will take samples of asteroid material and return it to Earth.
The probe is scheduled to arrive at Bennu in August 2018.
In 2020, OSIRIS-REx will circle down close to the surface and stick out a 10-foot-long robotic arm to touch the surface for several seconds at a time.
Bennu, at 500 meters across, has been compared to the size of a small mountain.
Admittedly, the sample collection is the most important part of OSIRIS-REx mission and it is highly anticipated by scientists involved in the project.
Yesterday the NASA Osiris-Rex mission launched without a hitch.
“We are going to map this brand-new world that we have never seen before”, principal investigator Dante Lauretta said. Two parachutes will slow the SRC down and it should land safely in the Utah desert in September, 2023.
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Although Bennu occupies the same approximate orbital distance from the sun, it poses little threat to Earth.
