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Imagine having to parallel park a 15-passenger van in a narrow parking spot surrounded by two-story rocks. Then imagine doing it on an asteroid traveling through outer space at speeds of over 101,000 km / h (62,700 miles per hour).
On Tuesday, a mission led by the US space agency NASA and a team of researchers from the University of Arizona in the United States will do just that, sending commands to a small spacecraft more than 200 million miles away (321.9 million miles). kilometers) away, and guiding OSIRIS-REx to suck up pieces of an asteroid called Bennu and bring them back to Earth. Within those samples there could be clues to the origins of life itself.
Four years ago, the US space agency deployed OSIRIS-REx on a mission to explore Bennu, a primordial piece of space debris that can trace its origins back to the formation of the solar system. Now, OSIRIS-REx is ready to land on Bennu’s surface, making it NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission and the largest delivery of extraterrestrial material since the Apollo era of the 1960s and 1970s. .
It’s a nearly two-decade technological feat in the works, and its main goal is to collect a pristine and unaltered sample from the asteroid’s surface. To do so, the spacecraft will use a special robotic arm with a harvesting head on the end. On Tuesday afternoon, the brave little craft is expected to descend to the surface of Bennu, reach out its arm, and blow up the asteroid with enough nitrogen gas to push material from the surface toward the collection head.
Studying Bennu will help us better understand the role that asteroids could play in delivering these life-forming compounds to Earth.
It will take OSIRIS-REx four hours to travel the 0.6 mile (one kilometer) distance to the surface, moving approximately 3.9 inches per second (10 centimeters per second). Once it approaches the surface, the spacecraft will extend its more than nine-foot-long (three-meter-long) robotic arm, called the TAGSAM (or Touch-and-go Sample Acquisition Mechanism), which is topped with a sample. collection device that resembles a large shower head. It is designed to blow a small burst of nitrogen gas over the surface of Bennu to remove some dust and rocks.
This material will then be collected in a ring around the head, which can hold approximately four pounds (1.8 kg) of material. The goal of OSIRIS-REx is to collect at least 0.13 pounds (60 g) of surface material from Bennu, which may not sound like much, but is an incredibly complicated maneuver to perform that requires extreme precision, especially on a rocky surface and irregular like Bennu’s, where the boulders can be the size of a football field.
OSIRIS-REx was launched by NASA in September 2016 to travel to Bennu.A drink
OSIRIS-REx arrived at Bennu in 2018 and meticulously mapped the asteroid’s surface over a two-year period to determine the best place to collect the sample. The result? A 66-foot-wide (20-meter-wide) crater near Bennu’s north pole that the team calls Nightingale. It was selected primarily because the crater appears to be young, meaning that the exposed rock likely consists of pristine samples from when the asteroid formed billions of years ago.
The OSIRIS-REx harvesting head was designed to perform best on a flat, sandy surface, which Bennu does not have. Scientists will therefore need to aim carefully, as it could spell trouble for the mission if the arm touches the top of rocks that are more than a few centimeters in diameter, severely limiting the amount of material that could be collected. . Also, TAGSAM only has three nitrogen bottles, so the team cannot afford to waste them.
Basically the team has a single shot to collect as much material as possible from the Nightingale Crater. This is because once the nitrogen gas is fired, the material on the surface breaks down and flies, hopefully, towards the collection head. It is an opportunity that has been brewing for literally years.
Asteroid mapping
OSIRIS-REx has two key tools that will help the spacecraft determine if it is safe to land and begin the collection process on Tuesday.
“There are two key products we have built, one of which is a detailed map of the asteroid’s surface, complete with potential dangers to the spacecraft,” Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the mission at the University of Arizona, told Al Jazeera. . “And the other is a catalog of features in the crater.”
If a sample is taken, it will be weighed and the team will determine if another attempt is necessary. But if all goes according to plan and there is enough material in the OSIRIS-REx’s collection head, it will be kept in a special container that will be discarded when the spacecraft passes Earth in 2023.
If this type of chemistry is happening in the early solar system, it probably happened in other solar systems as well. It helps us assess the probability of the origin of life occurring throughout the galaxy and ultimately throughout the universe.
But if the hazard map aboard OSIRIS-REx determines that it is unsafe to land at Nightingale, the spacecraft will abort the maneuver and the team will have to reevaluate its plans and maps. Both the onboard hazard map and the catalog of features in the crater “change as a result of firing the TAGSAM at the surface, so we will have to reconstruct our maps,” Lauretta explained.
If the team fails to collect at least 0.13 pounds of material from Bennu on Tuesday, there is a second chance starting in December, but it might need to be relocated to a different crater. That move would be a repeat of Tuesday’s plans, at another site near Bennu’s equator, called Osprey, which is equally attractive. Each dive is incredibly risky, so the team hopes to collect enough samples on the first attempt.
The samples that OSIRIS-REx could send to Earth could hold the keys to understanding how life formed here and elsewhere.Pay dirt
Asteroid researchers have been waiting for years to get their hands on the land of Bennu. These types of space rocks are incredibly interesting to scientists because asteroids contain pieces of the oldest materials that made up our solar system, and their study could allow scientists to answer fundamental questions about the origins of the solar system. That’s because moons and planets have changed over time, but most asteroids haven’t.
“Asteroids are like time capsules floating in space and can provide a fossil record of the birth of our solar system,” Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of Planetary Sciences, told Al Jazeera. “They can provide valuable information on how planets, like ours, arose.”
Bennu was selected as a target because scientists believe it is a small fragment of what was once a much larger space rock that broke apart during a collision between two asteroids early in the history of our solar system.
The pile of debris seen today is more than 4.5 billion years old, a perfectly preserved cosmic time capsule that could hold clues to the origin of life, Lauretta said.
“Bennu turned out to be exactly the type of target we expected him to be,” said Lauretta.
Using data collected from orbit, the team has determined two key discoveries: first, that 5 to 10 percent of Bennu’s mass is water, and second, that its surface is filled with carbon-rich molecules. This means that any sample returned to Earth could help scientists better understand the role asteroids played in bringing water to our planet and seeding it with the prebiotic material that provided the building blocks for life.
Asteroids are like time capsules floating in space that can provide a fossil record of the birth of our solar system. They can provide valuable information on how planets, like ours, came into being.
Earlier this month, researchers from the OSIRIS-REx team made an exciting discovery, which confirmed something the team had suspected all along: Bennu is rich in organic material. The results were published in a series of articles in the journal Science.
“Organic molecules make up all living things on Earth,” Jamie Elsila, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told Al Jazeera. “Studying Bennu will help us better understand the role that asteroids could play in delivering these life-forming compounds to Earth.”
Studying that material could also help scientists discover if life exists in other parts of the solar system as well.
“If this kind of chemistry is happening in the early solar system, it probably happened in other solar systems as well,” said Lauretta. “It helps us assess the probability that the origin of life occurs throughout the galaxy and, ultimately, throughout the universe.”
Once the asteroid samples are back on Earth, they will be cataloged by scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The agency will keep most of the material, study some of it immediately, and send some samples to research groups around the world. NASA also plans to store a portion in a safe place in New Mexico for safekeeping.
“The Bennu sample will provide important scientific information now, but also for generations to come,” Elsila said.
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