A NASA spacecraft landed on the rugged surface of the asteroid Bennu on Tuesday and took a sample of rocks dating back to the birth of our solar system to take home.
The minivan-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, extended its 11-foot (3.35 m) robotic arm into a flat patch of gravel near Bennu’s north pole and took the rock sample, the first handful of pristine asteroids from the space agency. rocks.
“Sample collection is complete and backburning has been executed,” Lockheed mission operator Estelle Church added seconds later, confirming that the spacecraft moved away from the space rock after making contact.
Also read: NASA’s spacecraft seeks to grab a piece of the asteroid Bennu
The probe will send back images of the sample collection on Wednesday and throughout the week so scientists can examine how much material was recovered and determine if the probe will need to make another collection attempt.
If a successful collection is confirmed, the spacecraft will travel back to Earth and arrive in 2023. Japan is the only other country that has already done so.
Bennu, located more than 100 million miles from Earth and whose acorn-shaped body formed in the early days of our solar system, could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists say. “Everything went exactly perfect,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a NASA live broadcast from Lockheed’s mission support building. “We have overcome the amazing challenges that this asteroid has thrown at us, and the spacecraft appears to have worked without a hitch.”
The robotic arm’s collection device, shaped like an oversized showerhead, is designed to release a pressurized gas to lift debris.
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The spacecraft was launched in 2016 from the Kennedy Space Center for the trip to Bennu. It has been in orbit around the asteroid for almost two years preparing for the “tap and go” maneuver.
“A lot of things could go wrong because the spacecraft is the size of a pickup truck and the asteroid has a lot of rocks,” Lucy Lim, a planetary scientist at NASA, said in an earlier interview. “So we have to go between the boulders to get our sample, and that takes a lot of planning.”
Also read: NASA’s Osiris-Rex prepares to ‘kiss’ the asteroid Bennu on a historic mission
Asteroids are among the remnants of the formation of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists believe that asteroids and comets that slammed into early Earth may have delivered organic compounds and water that seeded the planet for life. Atomic-level analysis of Bennu samples could provide key evidence to support that hypothesis.
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