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This afternoon, a NASA spacecraft more than 200 million miles from Earth successfully touched the surface of an asteroid, in an attempt to grab a handful of pebbles and dust from the space rock. Data from the spacecraft confirmed that the rover did hit the asteroid today, but NASA won’t know until tomorrow if it actually caught a sample of material.
“Declared Touchdown,” announced a mission controller when the team received data confirming the maneuver. “Sampling in progress”. The news of the success was met with cheers and applause from the engineers who followed the procedure.
The spacecraft that just touched the asteroid is OSIRIS-REx, and this sampling maneuver has taken years to complete. The main goal of the spacecraft is to bring a pristine sample of an asteroid to Earth, so that scientists can study the material in a laboratory. Asteroids are considered to be primordial remnants of the early Solar System, objects that have remained relatively unchanged since the dawn of the planets. Analyzing just a small part of an asteroid could give scientists a wealth of insight into the types of materials that were present when the Solar System was just beginning.
But if all went well with sampling, the OSIRIS-REx spoils will not be small. The mission team hopes to get up to 60 grams (2.1 ounces) of soil from the spacecraft’s target asteroid, called Bennu. If OSIRIS-REx grabbed that much material, it will be the largest sample of an asteroid ever collected, and the largest sample of material collected from another space body since the Apollo missions. Two other Japanese missions have taken asteroid samples before, but their caches were in the milligram range. And OSIRIS-REx could possibly get much more, with the ability to collect up to 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of asteroid samples.
To collect the sample, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is equipped with a long, thin robotic arm, with a cylindrical collection device attached to the end. This afternoon, the spacecraft descended to the surface of Bennu with outstretched arm and gently touched the asteroid for a few seconds. Just as the arm made contact, the rover released a blast of nitrogen gas that, hopefully, churned up the rocks on the asteroid’s surface. That should have pushed a considerable amount of material into the collector at the end of the arm. OSIRIS-REx also had to do all of this on its own, since a radio signal currently takes more than 18 minutes to arrive from Earth.
NASA hopes to know by tomorrow if OSIRIS-REx obtained a sample when the images from the spacecraft begin to arrive. “That will give us a much better idea of whether or not we have a sample and how the spacecraft is actually performing,” Beth Buck, mission operations program manager for OSIRIS-REx at Lockheed Martin, said during a conference of press before the sample maneuver. “But we will continue to look at that for the next 10 days … as we move forward.”
Over the weekend, the mission team will attempt to quantify the amount of material that OSIRIS-REx collected. With the spacecraft away from Bennu, the engineers will rotate the spacecraft with the sampling arm extended. When they compare the inertia of the spinning vehicle with previous data from a emptier spacecraft, the mission team should have a clear idea of how much they collected.
If they decide they collected more than 60 grams of material, the team will likely declare a success and begin preparing for OSIRIS-REx to depart Bennu in March. The spacecraft is scheduled to return to Earth in September 2023. At that time, the sample material will parachute to the surface and land in the Utah desert.
If the team discovers that not they get what they wanted, there are options to try again. OSIRIS-REx can perform up to two more sampling attempts as it has two additional bottles of nitrogen gas on board to agitate the material. However, those decisions will come later. For now, the team is celebrating just by touching the asteroid with OSIRIS-REx.
“We have overcome the amazing challenges that this asteroid has thrown at us, and the spacecraft appears to have operated flawlessly,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, during a live broadcast of the maneuver. “We managed to reach the surface of the asteroid. We were in contact. “
