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When NASA’s OSIRIS-REX spacecraft touched the surface of an asteroid Tuesday to collect a sample of rocks and soil, the operation went smoothly, much to the delight of mission operators.
“Transcendental,” said Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, moments later. “I mean, I can’t believe we made it.”
But the most important question remained unanswered: what part of the asteroid did OSIRIS-REX pick up? Did you manage to collect any samples?
With the asteroid, a rock called Bennu that is roughly as wide as the height of the Empire State Building, exerting only a hint of gravitational pull, it was not possible to simply put the sampling container on a scale and weigh it.
Also, the spacecraft was unable to send much data when it swooped in for its collection attempt. It was on the other side of the solar system, more than 200 million miles from Earth, and as it descended towards the asteroid, its main antenna was not pointed at our planet. That meant that OSIRIS-REX could provide only rudimentary “breadcrumbs” informing mission controllers of its position, speed, and status, but not photos of the asteroid that would reveal where the spacecraft touched.
The scientists chose a target they named Nightingale, located within a crater near Bennu’s north pole.
After collecting the sample, the spacecraft moved away from the asteroid and returned to a higher orbit. From there, it could start sending the vast amount of data it had collected back to Earth.
NASA is scheduled to release some of the photos at a press conference Wednesday at 5 p.m. The press conference will be broadcast on NASA Television or you can watch it in the video player below.
Those images should provide more clues, but scientists still won’t determine how much material is trapped inside the sample collector, which resembles a car air filter, until Saturday.
“There is an incredibly clever physics experiment that the team has designed here called a sample mass measurement,” Dr. Lauretta said during NASA’s television broadcast on Tuesday.
The robotic arm with the sample collector at the end will extend and then the spacecraft will take a turn on Saturday. “We are measuring a property called the moment of inertia,” said Dr. Lauretta.
The scientists will compare the spin speed with what they measured before collecting a sample. Just as a skater with outstretched arms holding a bar would spin slower than a skater with nothing, OSIRIS-REX will spin slower depending on the amount of material picked up.
Scientists expect at least a couple of ounces, but it could weigh more than four pounds.
“The precision, like everything in this program, is phenomenal,” said Dr. Lauretta. “We are talking about tens of grams of precision in a measurement on a spacecraft hundreds of millions of miles away.”
If by bad luck OSIRIS-REX became empty on Tuesday, you can try two more times.
Collecting the asteroid sample is the culmination of the $ 800 million mission, which launched four years ago. The spacecraft has been making detailed observations of Bennu for two years, mapping its surface features as small as a couple of inches wide. He even discovered that Bennu was shooting debris from its surface into space.
Asteroids, mostly located in orbits between Mars and Jupiter, are parts that never merged into a planet, and planetary scientists hope the Bennu samples can shed light on what the young solar system looked like when it formed 4.5 billion ago. of years. Asteroids like Bennu, which have minerals rich in carbon, may have provided the building blocks for life on Earth to emerge.
The asteroid is also being studied because its orbit could cause it to collide with Earth in the late 22nd century. The probability of this happening is low, and the asteroid is not large enough to wipe out human civilization should it occur.
OSIRIS-REX, the name is an abbreviation for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer, will leave the asteroid next year and leave the sample, which will parachute to a landing in Utah on September 24. of 2023..
