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NASA is set to make history next month.
the OSIRIS-REx probe is scheduled to carry out NASA’s first asteroid sampling operation on October 20, snagging precious dirt and gravel from a 500-meter-wide space rock called Bennu.
“I can’t tell you how excited I am,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona said during a news conference on Thursday (September 24). “I am confident that we are up to the challenge that lies ahead.”
Related: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sampling Mission in Pictures
That challenge is considerable. OSIRIS-REx, which has been orbiting Bennu for almost two years, will spiral down into a small crater called Mockingbird on October 20, aiming for a relatively flat, rockless region just 26 feet (8 m) wide. It will be a pretty tight grip for the spacecraft, which is the size of a 15-passenger van.
“This place is the width of a few parking spots and is surrounded by large rock-like structures the size of small buildings,” said Mike Moreau, deputy director of OSIRIS-REx projects at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. , Maryland. (Incidentally, the OSIRIS-REx team has dubbed the most dangerous of those obstacles “Mount Doom.”)
“So for perspective: the next time you park your car in front of your house or in front of a coffee shop and walk inside, think about the challenge of navigating OSIRIS-REx in one of these places 200 million miles away, “Moreau said.
And OSIRIS-REx must make this bold move on its own. It will take more than 18 minutes for signals to travel from Earth to the spacecraft on October 20, too long for real-time monitoring.
The safe touchdown zone is much smaller than originally envisioned by the mission team, which designed OSIRIS-REx with a 50m wide mattress in mind. But Determining It turned out to be much rockier than ground-based oscilloscope observations had suggested. And the best sampling material, fresh, fine-grained material that has not been exposed to the harsh space environment for a long time, resided at Nightingale.
OSIRIS-REx will not stay parked there for long. The probe will kiss the fine-grained soil with its sampling mechanism, which is attached to the end of an 11-foot-long (3.4 m) robotic arm, for just a few seconds. That dirt will be removed by an explosion of nitrogen gas and collected by the sampling head, which the team members have compared to the air filter in a car.
OSIRIS-REx will then slowly and carefully back away from Bennu, and the mission team will assess his capture. The goal is to get at least 2 ounces (60 grams) of asteroid material. If the October 20 walkthrough is deemed insufficient, and the team hopes to decide one way or another on October 30, OSIRIS-REx could make another attempt, on a backup site called Osprey, no earlier than January 2021 (the research has three nitrogen bottles, so it could theoretically take three changes to sample collection).
Related: Chunks of Heaven: A Brief History of Sample Return Missions
If all goes according to plan, OSIRIS-REx will depart Bennu in March 2021 and return to Earth with its cosmic cargo. The asteroid sample will land in the Utah desert, encased in a special return capsule, on September 24, 2023.
The material will then be studied by scientists around the world who want to learn about the early days of the solar system and how life began on earth, among other topics. After all, asteroids are “time capsules” left over from the planet-forming era, NASA officials have stressed.
And Bennu is rich in organic compounds that contain carbon and hydrated minerals. Thus, it is similar to space rocks that many researchers believe helped, through countless impacts, to make Earth a habitable world long ago.
The $ 800 million OSIRIS-REx mission, short for “Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer”, launched in September 2016 and arrived in orbit around Bennu on December 31, 2018.
Probe work for the past 21 months has not been fully devoted to preparing the sample collection kiss. For example, their observations are also helping scientists better understand how asteroids move through space, which could lead to better trajectory predictions for potentially dangerous asteroids (a class that includes Bennu).
OSIRIS-REx will not be the first probe to bring pristine pieces of asteroids to Earth. The Japanese probe Hayabusa delivered some grains from the stony asteroid Itokawa in 2010. And the Hayabusa2 spacecraft recently. collected samples from the carbon-rich asteroid Ryugu, which are scheduled to arrive here in December.
The OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2 teams have been working together over the years, and their collaboration will continue after the samples from both missions arrive home, Lauretta said.
“Combined, it’s an amazing data set – to be able to have information on these two near-Earth asteroids, which on the surface look similar to each other, but are quite different in detail,” said Lauretta. “We are very excited to have a coordinated international sample analysis program that will analyze the materials of these asteroids and learn much more about asteroids in general and these carbon-rich asteroids in particular.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
