On September 24 of this year, in the Utah desert, the spacecraft will descend by parachute from the sky OSIRIS-REx of NASA who brings with him a sample he collected from the rocky surface of the asteroid Bennu.
OSIRIS-REx will become the first US mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth, after a seven-year effort in space, including landing on Bennu to collect dust and rocks.
The intrepid mission is about to face one of its biggest challenges yet: bringing the asteroid sample to Earth while protects it from heat, vibration and threats from terrestrial contaminants.
“Once the sample capsule lands, our team will race against time to retrieve it and bring it to the safety of a temporary clean room,” Mike Moreau, deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. .
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So, over the next six months, the OSIRIS-REx team will practice and refine the procedures necessary to recover the sample in Utah and transport it to a new laboratory built for the material at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
There, scientists will unpack the sample, distribute up to a quarter of it to the worldwide OSIRIS-REx science team for analysis, and select the remainder for other scientists to study, now and in future generations.
NASA Goddard and KinetX Aerospace flight dynamics engineers are reviewing the trajectory that will bring the spacecraft closer to Earth. At Lockheed Martin in Denver, team members control the spacecraft and prepare a party to retrieve the sample capsule. This summer, crews in Colorado and Utah will practice all the steps to safely recover the capsule, while protecting it from contamination.
At the Johnson Space Center, the conservation team is rehearsing their procedure for unpack and process the sample inside the glove boxes. Meanwhile, members of the sample science team are preparing the investigations they will carry out on the sample material once it is received.
“The OSIRIS-REx team has already performed amazing feats in characterizing and sampling the asteroid Bennu,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator from the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These achievements are a direct result of the extensive training and testing we do every step of the way. We are bringing that level of discipline and dedication to this final phase of flight operations.”
Asteroids are the ancient materials left over from the original era of planet formation and may contain molecular precursors of life.
Scientists have learned a lot from studying asteroid fragments that have naturally hit the ground as meteorites. But to understand whether asteroids played a role in delivering these compounds to Earth’s surface more than 4 billion years ago, scientists need a pristine sample from space, free of terrestrial contaminants.
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Furthermore, the more brittle rocks observed at Bennu probably would not have survived passage through Earth’s atmosphere as meteorites. “There are two ubiquitous things on Earth: water and biology,” said Dr. Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at Nasa Goddard.
“Both can seriously alter meteorites when they land on the ground and confuse the story told by the chemistry and mineralogy of the sample. A pristine sample could provide information about the development of the solar system.”
On September 24, as the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flies past Earth, it will release its sample return capsule, thus ending its primary mission. The capsule, estimated to contain about a cup of the Bennu material (250 grams +/- 101 grams) to be precise, will land on an ellipse 59 by 15 kilometers inside the Dugway Military Proving Grounds in Utah.
team members OSIRIS-REx Goddard, KinetX, Lockheed Martin, and NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, are using computer models to test navigation plans under various weather, solar activity, and space debris scenarios to ensure that, when the capsule enters Earth’s atmosphere at 14:41 UTC, it will land within the target area 13 minutes later.
Recovery teams are responsible for securing the sample return capsule landing site and helicoptering it to a portable clean room located on the firing range. In addition, the crews will collect soil and air samples around the landing capsule. These samples will help identify if any tiny contaminants came into contact with the asteroid sample.
Once the capsule is inside the building with the portable clean room, team members will remove the heat shield, back case, and other components to prepare the sample container for transport to Houston.
The return to Earth of samples from the asteroid Bennu will be the culmination of an effort of more than 12 years by NASA and its mission partners, but it marks the beginning of a new phase of discovery in which scientists from around the world will turn their attention to analyzing samples dating to the formation of our solar system.