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The most complex maneuver ever imagined by NASA took five seconds to scoop up a few but precious grams of dust and rock fragments from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, 322 million kilometers from Earth. In fact, several times in recent months they had tried the operation to master the orbits and movements of the Osiris Rex probe, taking into account that the small celestial body 500 meters in diameter was rotating in the meantime. Bennu was discovered in 1999 in a survey carried out by various observatories to identify asteroids that are dangerously close to Earth. And Bennu one of these.
The stages
The NASA mission in which three Italian scientists (Maurizio Pajola, Elisabetta Dotto and John Robert Brucato) from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Padua, Rome and Florence, managed by the NASA Goddard Center in conjunction with the University of Arizona, is a science temple for the investigation of the small worlds of the solar system. The probe was launched in 2016 and once it entered orbit in 2018, it has since studied the small dark celestial body for its carbonaceous nature, trying to identify the most suitable place to sample material. Finally, an area known as Nightingale was chosen, a crater free of dangerous rocks that could endanger the complicated operation. And shortly after midnight (Italian time) Osiris Rex made the descent to the surface and his robotic arm, basically a vacuum cleaner, sucked in a few grams of dust and then ascended to a safer orbit.
The hypothesis of a second operation
Scientists will now assess whether the extraction of sufficient material will reach at least the expected 60 grams. If this is not the case, a second withdrawal operation was not undertaken before resuming the return path. At the end of the trip in September 2023 of the probe that reached the vicinity of the Earth, the capsule with the precious samples will be detached, hanging from a parachute in the American desert of Utah.
October 21, 2020 (change October 21, 2020 | 15:47)
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