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- The US probe “Osiris Rex” has successfully completed a complex maneuver that lasted several hours to take a sample from the asteroid Bennu.
- “The missile did everything it was supposed to do,” said Dante Lauretta, chief mission scientist at the US space agency Nasa.
- Bennu is considered one of the most dangerous asteroids. It could get very close to earth in a good 150 years.
Cheers and applause at the control center of the US space agency Nasa: During the maneuver, “Osiris Rex” was the first American missile to take a sample from an asteroid. It should be sent back to Earth in about three years. “I can’t believe we did it. It’s historic, it’s wonderful, ”said Dante Lauretta, the mission’s chief scientist.
NASA expects between 60 and 2000 grams of rock
Whether the sample taken was usable and sufficient will only be revealed in the next few days after “Osiris Rex” has sent more data back to Earth, Lauretta said. NASA scientists hope to obtain between 60 and 2000 grams of dust, debris and rocks.
The probe had temporarily left its place in the orbit of the asteroid Bennu and was only a few meters from it. Using a kind of robotic arm called a “Tagsam” (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism), it touched the surface of the asteroid for about five seconds and expelled pressurized nitrogen to agitate the sample material.
After sucking up the sample, the probe moved away from Bennu again and returned to its orbit. NASA had previously successfully rehearsed the maneuver twice.
If the sample taken is usable it will be revealed in the next few days when the ‘Osiris Rex’ sends more data to Earth.
“Osiris Rex” took off from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu about two years later. Since then, the six-meter-long, 2,100-kilogram probe (its abbreviation stands for: Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) has been orbiting the asteroid and examining it with its science instruments and cameras.
The mission costs about a billion dollars
Scientists hope that the mission, which will cost about a billion dollars, will provide information about the formation of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago, because asteroids are remnants of this time.
In 2005, the Japanese space probe “Hayabusa” landed on an asteroid. In 2010, it brought to Earth the first soil samples ever collected from such a celestial body. There have been other flights to asteroids, but so far no other probe has returned material to Earth.
