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Landing.
In early October, NASA rock samples successfully collected from the asteroid Bennu, a relatively small and well-preserved space rock about 200 million miles from Earth. On Friday, NASA released images of the spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, briefly approaching and landing in the debris of Bennu. The events, seen in the space agency’s tweet below, show OSIRIS-REx carefully descending to the rocky surface of Bennu.
Spaceship collected about 60 grams, or about two ounces, of fine-grained material during the fast landing, which lasted less than 16 seconds. For planetary scientists, this asteroid material is invaluable: Bennu hasn’t changed much since the formation of our solar system (4.5 billion years), so the samples give a glimpse into our past and how our planets formed.
“They are like time capsules from the beginning of our solar system,” Richard Binzel, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a scientist working on the OSIRIS-REx mission, told Mashable. “This is like testing the original ingredients to make planets.”
(The first ambitious mission to bring asteroid samples back to Earth, Japan’s Hayabusa mission, returned in 2010.)
NASA called the effort a “Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event.” The maneuver was in fact a quick “tag” of Bennu’s surface. OSIRIS-REx carefully approached the asteroid for more than four hours before briefly landing and firing nitrogen gas to remove fragments in Bennu’s sampler. Then the spaceship quickly took off.
OSIRIS-REx captured so much surface material that some of the fine grains even escaped before the collector was saved for the trip home. The spacecraft is expected to arrive on Earth with the priceless cargo on September 24, 2023.
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