A rendering of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.NASAA NASA spacecraft on Tuesday touched the floor of the asteroid Bennu, in a mission that goals to retur
A rendering of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.
NASA
A NASA spacecraft on Tuesday touched the floor of the asteroid Bennu, in a mission that goals to return rocky items for examination on Earth in 2023.
“Landing declared,” NASA mentioned on a webcast from the mission’s management heart. “Sampling is in progress.”
The mission marks the primary time NASA has tried to return supplies from an asteroid, a feat that solely Japan has pulled off earlier than however in smaller portions. Whereas NASA confirmed that the spacecraft touched the asteroid, the house company is not going to know for a number of extra hours if it collected supplies efficiently.
Known as OSIRIS-REx – an acronym that stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Useful resource Identification, Safety, Regolith Explorer – the NASA spacecraft represents the end result of years of labor. The mission launched in Sept. 2016, with a complete value of about $1 billion.
“Every part I’ve labored on has been targeted on at the present time, getting the spacecraft all the way down to contact the asteroid and acquire the pattern,” Dr. Dante Lauretta, a professor of Planetary Science and Cosmochemistry on the College of Arizona and the chief of the mission, informed CNBC.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft itself is concerning the dimension of a giant van: 20 ft lengthy, 9 ft broad, 10 ft tall, with an 11 foot arm that may attain all the way down to seize materials in a maneuver NASA calls “tagging” the asteroid. The spacecraft was constructed by Lockheed Martin’s house division.
“What deep house missions are capable of uncover is instantly relevant to [NASA’s other efforts, such as] lunar exploration,” Lockheed Martin director of deep house exploration Ari Vogel informed CNBC.
Tagging the asteroid
A picture of the asteroid Bennu taken by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.
NASA
OSIRIS-REx is greater than 200 million miles from Earth, having arrived at Bennu in Dec 2018 after two years of journey. NASA spent most of 2019 surveying Bennu with the devices on board the spacecraft, to additional inform its tag try. NASA introduced in Dec. 2019 that OSIRIS-REx would goal a location named Nightingale, which is the place Tuesday’s materials assortment occurred.
Bennu is “the very best characterised asteroid astronomically in historical past,” Lauretta mentioned. Just like the Earth, the asteroid is in orbit across the Solar. On the time of the try, Bennu was on the other facet of the Solar, which means there’s a communications time delay of about 19 minutes between Lockheed Martin’s mission management in Colorado and the spacecraft on the asteroid.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft undergoes testing earlier than launching in 2016.
NASA
“Once we’re speaking to the spacecraft, we have now these big antennas which might be everywhere in the world that ship a sign that goes previous the solar, after which one other distance throughout the photo voltaic system, after which it reaches the spacecraft,” Lauretta mentioned.
Lauretta is accountable for the scientific targets of the mission, primarily deciding on the location to gather the supplies.
“As soon as I made that choice, I handed it over to the engineering staff and spacecraft staff, which Lockheed Martin is answerable for,” Lauretta mentioned.
The pattern assortment is a four and a half hour occasion, with the spacecraft performing a number of maneuvers to slowly method the asteroid’s floor. The OSIRIS-REx operations staff confirmed that the spacecraft touched the floor efficiently, carried out its pattern assortment, after which backed away from the asteroid with its on board spacecraft thrusters.
OSIRIS-REx aimed to gather between two ounces and 5 kilos of Bennu’s materials to ship again to Earth. It is the most important such pattern return from house for the reason that Apollo moon missions.
Forward of the landing, Lauretta mentioned that the OSIRIS-REx staff created “a really detailed map of the asteroid” to search out the precise goal spot. The spacecraft did not technically land on the asteroid, Vogel defined, for various causes. Primarily, Vogel mentioned that Bennu has its personal micro-gravity environments, so “any type of drive can tremendously perturb the asteroid’s orbit” and make it “actually difficult” to regulate the spacecraft. That is why NASA and Lockheed Martin created the “touch-and-go-maneuver,” so the spacecraft would solely gently contact the asteroid earlier than backing away.
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