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Washington (AFP)
NASA’s Osiris-Rex robotic spacecraft is scheduled to begin a delicate operation Tuesday to store the precious particles it collected from the asteroid Bennu, but were leaking into space when a flap opened.
The probe is on a mission to collect fragments that scientists hope will help unravel the origins of our solar system, but which had a snag after it took too large a sample.
Fragments from the asteroid’s surface are in a collector at the end of the probe’s three-meter (10-foot) arm, slowly escaping into space because some rocks have prevented the compartment from closing completely.
That arm is the one that came into contact with Bennu for a few seconds last Tuesday at the culmination of a mission launched from Earth about four years ago.
The probe is believed to have collected about 400 grams (14 ounces) of fragments, far more than the minimum 60 grams required, NASA previously said.
Scientists must keep the sample in a capsule in the center of the probe, and the operation was brought forward to Tuesday from the scheduled date of November 2 due to the leak.
“The abundance of material we collected from Bennu made it possible to accelerate our decision to stow,” said Dante Lauretta, project manager.
Osiris-Rex is scheduled to return home in September 2023, hopefully the largest sample returned from space since the Apollo era.
The storage operation will take several days, NASA said, because it requires team oversight and involvement, unlike some of the other Osiris-Rex operations that run autonomously.
After each step in the process, the spacecraft will send information and images back to Earth so that scientists can make sure everything runs smoothly.
The probe is so far away that it takes 18.5 minutes for its transmissions to reach Earth, and any signal from the control room takes the same amount of time to reach Osiris-Rex.
© 2020 AFP
