On Tuesday a NASA spacecraft Bennu went down on the hard surface of an asteroid, and caught a sample of post-solar rocks to bring it home.
It was the first for the United States – only planets previously sampled by Japan.
The so-called “touch-and-go” maneuver in Denver, Colorado, was conducted by Lockheed Martin Space, where an advertiser said at 6:12 pm (22:12 GMT) on Tuesday: The sampling process is underway, ”and the scientists erupted in celebration.
Seconds later, Lockheed mission operator Porter Estelle Church confirmed that the spacecraft had been relieved from contact with the belt after making contact, announcing: “Sample collection is complete and burn-burn is executed.”
The Historic Mission was 12 years in construction and rested during a 16-second period where the minivan-sized OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft extended its 11-foot (3.35-m) robotic arm toward a flat patch of gravel near the North Pole of Bennu. Samples of rocks pulled – NASA’s first handful of ancient asteroid rocks.
The probe will return images of the sample collection on Wednesday and throughout the week so that scientists can check how much material has been received and verify that another collection will have to be attempted for verification.
This mosaic image of the asteroid Bennu was made up of 12 polycam images collected within 15 miles (24 km) by the OSIISIS-REx spacecraft on December 2, 2018. [NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Handout via Reuters]
Scientists want at least 2 ounces (60 grams) and, ideally, close to 4 pounds (2 kilograms) of Bennu’s black, decaying, carbon-rich material – it is believed to contain building blocks of the solar system. The planet is located more than 200 million miles (321.9 million km) from Earth.
The head of NASA’s science mission, Thomas Zarbuchen, compared Bennu to the Rosetta Stone: “The whole of our planet, the history of the solar system, over the last billions of years.”
‘Absolutely Perfect’
If successful collection is confirmed, the spacecraft will begin its journey to Earth, arriving in 2023.
“Everything was just perfect,” Dante Lure Retta, chief investigator of OSIRIS-Rex at the University of Arizona at Tucson, said on NASA’s live feed at Lockheed’s Mission Support Building. “We’ve met the amazing challenges that this planet has thrown at us, and the spacecraft seems to have operated flawlessly.”
The robotic arm’s collection device, shaped like a large shower head, is designed to release compressed gas to kick debris.
The spacecraft for Bennu’s journey began in 2016 at the Kennedy Space Center. It has been in orbit around the planet for almost two years preparing for the Touch and Go maneuver.
Bennu, who billion. More than a billion years old, it was chosen as the target because scientists believe it was one large space rock after another that erupted during a collision between two asteroids early in solar history. System.
“Asteroids are like time capsules floating in space that could provide a remnant record of our solar system’s birth,” Lori Glaze, director of planetary sciences, told Al Jazeera. “They can provide valuable information about how planets like ours came to be.”
Thanks to data collected from orbit, the NASA team has determined two key findings: first, Bennu’s mass is 5 to 10 percent water and second, its surface is filled with carbon-rich molecules. An atomic-level analysis of Bennu’s specimens could help scientists better understand what role they played in bringing water to Earth and creating seeds with zoological materials that provide building blocks for life.
Studying that material can also help scientists discover whether life exists elsewhere in the solar system.
“If this kind of chemistry was happening in the early solar system, it probably happened in other solar systems as well,” LIR Retta, chief investigator at OSIRIS-Rex, told Al Jazeera in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s progress. “It helps to evaluate the probability of the origin of life throughout the galaxy and, ultimately, the entire universe.”
Japan expects samples of its second asteroid mission – a maximum of Mg. – Descend into the Australian Australian Desert in December.
