NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx touches the asteroid Bennu in historic attempt to return samples

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 area 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 price of about $1 billion.

“Every little thing I’ve labored on has been targeted on today, getting the spacecraft all the way down to contact the asteroid and gather the pattern,” Dr. Dante Lauretta, a professor of Planetary Science and Cosmochemistry on the College of Arizona and the chief of the mission, instructed CNBC.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft itself is in regards to the measurement of a giant van: 20 toes lengthy, 9 toes large, 10 toes 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 area division.

“What deep area missions are capable of uncover is straight relevant to [NASA’s other efforts, such as] lunar exploration,” Lockheed Martin director of deep area exploration Ari Vogel instructed CNBC.

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 perfect 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 alternative aspect 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.

“Once we’re speaking to the spacecraft, now we have these large antennas which can be all around 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 positioning to gather the supplies.

“As soon as I made that choice, I handed it over to the engineering group and spacecraft group, which Lockheed Martin is chargeable for,” Lauretta mentioned.

The pattern assortment is a four and a half hour occasion, with the spacecraft performing a number of maneuvers to slowly strategy the asteroid’s floor. The OSIRIS-REx operations group 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 area because the Apollo moon missions.

Forward of the landing, Lauretta mentioned that the OSIRIS-REx group created “a really detailed map of the asteroid” to seek out the correct goal spot. The spacecraft did not technically land on the asteroid, Vogel defined, for a variety of 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 tough” to manage 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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