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The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made contact, albeit briefly, with the asteroid Bennu on Tuesday, NASA confirmed, but the success of the sampling will only be known in a few days.
“Contact sampling confirmed (…) completed,” announced the US space agency during a live broadcast of the operations.
The moment of contact with the celestial body was celebrated with applause, as it represents the culmination of a mission that continues in the fourth year.
However, the success of this landing and sampling will only be known in a few days. OSIRIS-REx is expected to return to Earth within three years, in 2023.
The probe approached Bennu on December 3, 2018. At that time, the device approached the asteroid after a few minutes from 5:00 p.m. in Lisbon, after a ‘trip’ through space of more than two years, in which it was slowly approaching the rocky body.
This is NASA’s first mission to study and collect a sample from an asteroid, in this case one of the closest to Earth and the smallest celestial body ever orbited so closely by a probe.
Discovered in 1999, Bennu is known to be rich in carbon, a basic compound of life as it is known.
For a year, OSIRIS-REx studied the asteroid, without landing on it, in order to select a safe and scientifically interesting place to collect, with the help of a robotic arm, a rock fragment that will be sent for analysis to the Earth. where the probe is expected to return in 2023.
The plan envisioned that the robotic arm, which is just over three meters long, would touch the surface of the asteroid for about five seconds, during which time an explosion of nitrogen gas (nitrogen) would cause the surface to oscillate. allowing the collection of rock fragments.
The asteroid piece, weighing at least 60 grams, will land on Earth in a capsule that will detach from the probe and will be ‘equipped’ with a heat shield and a parachute.
According to NASA, the mission will help scientists better understand how the planets in the Solar System formed and how life began on Earth. Asteroids like Bennu contain natural resources like water, organic compounds, and metals.
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