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After orbiting the closest planet Moon Bannu for nearly two years, NASA’s Osiris-RX spacecraft is set to collect samples from the star planet’s surface on Tuesday to reach its robotic arm.
The Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972 brought back 382 kilograms of samples of moon rock, pebbles and stones.
If all goes according to plan, the samples collected from the spaceship will be returned to Earth in 2023 for examination by scientists.
OSIRIS-REx’s Touch-and-Go (TAGSAM) sample acquisition mechanism successfully touched and fired one of its nitrogen gas tanks onto the surface of the asteroid, collecting material through a filter in the round sampler head.
Finally, says Lauretta, the flight engineers will use “an incredibly intelligent physical technique” to see how much energy it takes to rotate the spacecraft with its sample arm extended to maximum range. It has since conducted investigations and prepared for sample collection, for example by performing test operations.
To study and preserve the asteroid sample, NASA is now building laboratories at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“If this kind of chemistry was happening in the first solar system, it could have happened in other solar systems as well,” Loretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-Rex, told Al Jazeera in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s progress.
A NASA spacecraft landed on an asteroid on Tuesday that scientists say may contain the building blocks of life.
NASA spacecraft to skim the surface of an asteroid, take the sample home
The mission – meaning segmentation, spectral interpretation, resource identification, security regolith explorer – was launched in September 2016.
After establishing that the coast was clear, Osiris-Rex closed in the last few yards for sampling.
NASA chose this particular asteroid because it is conveniently close and also ancient: scientists have calculated that it formed in the first 10 million years of our solar system’s history, 4.5 billion years ago. Bennu herself has an ever-minimal 1 in 2,700 chance of colliding with Earth between the year 2175 and 2199.
“It’s a historic first mission for NASA to return a sample of asteroids, and it’s difficult,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said at a press conference on Monday.
Osiris-Rex can perform up to three touch-and-go maneuvers in the event that it fails. The more scientists know about the paths and properties of potentially dangerous space rocks like this, the better. By October 30, NASA will confirm that the spacecraft has collected enough samples, or if it is named Asprey at another landing site in January, it is necessary to attempt to collect samples. “The spacecraft will then move away from Earth, going into orbit around the sun, and the container will descend into the atmosphere and on a parachute will land in the Utah desert just before 9:00 Mountain DST on Sunday, September 24, 2023.”
“It will be another great day for us”.
“A lot of things could go wrong because the spacecraft is the size of a van and the asteroid contains a lot of boulders,” NASA planetary scientist Lucy Lim said in a previous interview. Bennu has been (mostly) undisturbed for billions of years.
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