“We'll have new questions, there will be future tools, and we want to make sure we haven't burned through the whole sample.”Įven the first scientific findings should significantly expand our knowledge of asteroids like Bennu.
“Just like with Apollo, we want to preserve the vast majority of the samples for future scientists,” says University of Arizona planetary scientist Andrew Ryan, leader of the OSIRIS-REx Sample Physical and Thermal Analysis Working Group. But 70 percent of the stuff returned will remain untouched by anyone, at least for now. Four percent of the sample will go to Canada, a contributor to the mission, and at least 0.5 percent will be sent to Japan, which carried out the two Hayabusa missions that brought back the world's first asteroid samples in 20. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of ArizonaĪfter scientists open up the TAGSAM back on Earth, a quarter of its haul will go to the OSIRIS-REx team, who will disperse it from the Johnson Space Center to laboratories around the world. A MOSAIC IMAGE of Bennu taken by OSIRIS-REx from 24 kilometers (15 miles) away. Some extra bits of sample even got stuck to the outside of the TAGSAM. Photographs taken during the collection process suggest the mission scooped up plenty of material. “It looks like an air filter, except we brought the air,” Lauretta says. In October 2020 the spacecraft made a close approach to the asteroid, briefly touching the surface with its Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), a robotic arm that fired a burst of nitrogen gas to stir up dust and rock, which it then funneled into its collector head. Sample return is a cornerstone of planetary science.” “Having time, having this huge team and the ability to do coordinated analyses, to look at the same sample with multiple different techniques-there's really nothing that can replace that. “We have access to the absolute state-of-the-art technology here on Earth,” says co-investigator Michelle Thompson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University. Those scans revealed a lot about Bennu, including that it's more like a pile of loosely bound rubble than a solid object and that it holds water-bearing minerals. It spent two years near the space rock, making measurements with its onboard cameras, spectrometers, and other instruments. OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016 and arrived at Bennu in 2018. “We want to understand the role that these carbon-rich asteroids played in delivering the precursors of life to Earth.” Lauretta of the University of Arizona, the mission's principal investigator. “The ‘O’ in ‘OSIRIS-REx’ is really for the origin of life,” says Dante S. The samples will reveal the state of the solar system when it was first forming, including which amino acids and other chemical compounds important for biology were present. (Meteorites are great, too, but their unprotected burn through our atmosphere alters them.) Scientists there will carefully open the inner container, handling it inside a glove box to keep out all contaminants, to retrieve some of the only pristine primordial bits of asteroid ever to reach Earth's surface.
Nasa news asteroid september 2015 portable#
If all goes well, recovery teams will helicopter it to a portable clean room to remove its heat shield and back shell and then fly it to a specially prepared facility at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. On September 24 the probe is set to release its sample return capsule, which will barrel through Earth's atmosphere and make a parachute landing at the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. Hofmann is one of around 200 scientists who will receive portions of the cargo OSIRIS-REx brings back. I'm getting goose bumps talking about this.” “We get to be the first people to see what's in there. “Bennu is a time capsule of the early solar system, and we're cracking it open,” says Amy Hofmann, an isotope geochemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is a co-investigator on the mission. The probe will drop off a canister holding about a cup of pebbles and dust from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. What would it be like to hold a piece of outer space in your hand? Some lucky scientists will find out soon when NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft (shorthand for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) returns from its seven-year mission.
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