The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made history on Tuesday when its OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft was collecting samples from an asteroid named Bennu, that scientists believe may have had water on its surface earlier in its history.
OSIRIS-Rex briefly touched the surface of the asteroid to collect rocks, pebbles and other geological artifacts from the celestial body so that, according to NASA, they could be brought back to Earth by 2023. Although it took several hours to reach the surface of the asteroid, engineers believe it only touched it for six seconds before using its thrusters to withdraw. On Wednesday, the agency released partial footage of the OSIRIS-Rex voyage, which showed the spacecraft’s arm slowly descending to the ground, not much different from what it could find in Earth’s desert.
“You can see the particles flying all over the place,” Dentile Lure Retta, chief investigator of the OSIRIIRIS-Rex mission, told reporters at a news briefing on Wednesday. “We really messed up the surface of this planet, but it’s a good mess. This is the mess we’re hoping for.”
On Tuesday, OSIRIS-Rex used its thrusters to push itself out of orbit around Bennu, where it has been since 2018, according to the agency. The spacecraft then began landing about four of the two half miles towards its surface, followed by a pair. The tricks that allowed him to reach “Nightingale”, a predefined site is the size of a small parking lot with some relatively clear spots on the planet, covered with stones. Once he got there, he used Ben’s sample hand to collect material from the Northern Hemisphere, known as the Touch-and-Go Sample Procurement Mechanism (TAGSAM).
“It was an incredible feat – and today we have both science and engineering to study these mysterious ancient storytellers of the solar system and our future missions,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters. Washington, said in a statement. “A piece of primitive rock that has witnessed the entire history of our solar system may now be ready to come home for scientific discovery, and we can’t wait to see what comes next.”
See how the hand of the craft sample touches the surface in the following video:
There are many reasons to be optimistic about what these land samples can teach us about the origins of life in the universe. For one thing, Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid, which means it contains a large amount of carbon, a supposed element in the building blocks of life. The asteroid itself is small, about 500 meters in diameter. Loretta announced two years ago that, based on the appearance of clay-like material on the planet’s surface, Bennu “seems to be a very water-rich target, and water is the most interesting and probably the most amazing thing you’ll do with an asteroid mine.”
Amy Simon, a deputy instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in detail at the time that “the presence of hydrated minerals around the planet confirms that from the beginning of the formation of the solar system to the formation of fossils. An excellent specimen is that when samples of this material will be returned by a mission to Earth in 2023, scientists will have a wealth of new information about the history and evolution of our solar system. “
NASA experts believe that Bennu is ancient and, in addition to shedding light on how life may have come to our planet, may also provide information about the formation of the early solar system.
The next step for NASA is to find out how many asteroids it was actually able to collect. To do so, according to Space News, they will first need to use the camera to take photographs of TAGSAM, from the material captured inside to the many pads hanging from the bottom of the spacecraft. Once they have done this, NASA will then slowly rotate the OSIRIS-Rex in the process of measuring the change in the moment of its inertia and from there will be able to detect the mass of their sample at an error distance of about 20 grams.
