NASA Probe Collects Largest Sample Ever From Asteroid
The largest sample ever collected from an asteroid is on its way to Planet Earth, ready to be delivered.
A NASA spacecraft will fly by Earth on Sunday and drop at least a cup of the debris it picked up from Bennu. ending a seven-year adventure.
The sample capsule parachutes into the Utah desert as its mother ship, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft, zooms out to meet another asteroid.
Scientists expect to recover about half a kilogram (250 grams) of rock and dust, much more than the teaspoon or so that Japan brought back from the other two asteroids. No other country has searched for asteroid fragments, preserved time capsules at the threshold of our solar system that can help explain how Earth – and life – came to be.
Sunday’s landing concludes a four-billion-mile (6.2 billion-kilometer) journey highlighted by an encounter with carbon-rich Bennu, a unique pogo-stick-style touch and sample capture, a jammed lid that sent some debris spilling into space, and now the return of NASA’s first asteroid samples.
“I ask myself how many heart-pounding moments you can have in one lifetime, because I feel like I might be reaching my limit,” said Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, the mission’s lead investigator.
A brief overview of the spacecraft and its cargo:
A LONG WAY
The asteroid chaser Osiris-Rex blasted off on a billion-dollar mission in 2016. It arrived at Bennu in 2018 and spent the next two years orbiting the small spinning space rock, looking for the best place to grab samples. Three years ago, the spacecraft swooped in and extended its 11-foot (3-meter) wand, briefly touching the asteroid’s surface and sucking up dust and rocks. The device pushed down with such force and gripped so much that the rocks were wedged around the edge of the deck. As the samples drifted into space, Lauretta and her team scrambled to get the remaining material into the capsule. The exact amount inside cannot be known until the container is opened.
Asteroid Bennu
Discovered in 1999, Bennu is believed to be the remnant of a much larger asteroid that collided with another space rock. It’s barely half a mile wide, about the height of the Empire State Building, and its black rugged surface is littered with boulders. Round in shape, like a spinning wheel, Bennu orbits the sun every 14 months and rotates every four hours. Scientists believe that Bennu has remnants of the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. It could come dangerously close to hitting Earth on September 24, 2182 – exactly 159 years after the asteroid’s first pieces arrived. Closer study of Osiris-Rex can help humanity figure out how to reverse Bennu if needed, Lauretta said.
GAME DAY
Osiris-Rex will release the sample capsule from a distance of 63,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) four hours before it is scheduled to land at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range on Sunday morning. The release command comes from spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin’s control center in Colorado. Shortly after this, the mother ship steers away and goes to investigate another asteroid. The capsule — nearly 3 feet wide (81 centimeters) and 1.6 feet (50 centimeters) tall — will hit the atmosphere at 27,650 mph (44,500 km/h) during the final 13 minutes of descent. The main parachute decelerates the last mile (1.6 km), allowing a gentle 11 mph (18 km/h) touchdown. When everything is deemed safe, the capsule is transported by helicopter to the area’s temporary clean lab. The next morning, a plane transports a sealed container full of rubble to Houston, home of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. NASA is broadcasting live. set at approximately 10:55 a.m. EDT.
CLEANS LIKE CLEANSING
The new lab at Johnson will be limited to Bennu debris to avoid cross-contamination with other collections, said NASA curator Kevin Righter. Building 31 already has moon rocks brought by Apollo astronauts between 1969 and 1972, as well as comet dust and solar wind specks collected on two previous flights, as well as Martian meteorites found in Antarctica. Asteroid samples are handled by staff in cleanroom suits from head to toe in nitrogen-purging glove boxes. NASA is planning a flashy public reveal of Bennu’s riches on October 11th.
ASTEOID FALL
NASA is calling this fall Asteroid Autumn, and three asteroid flybys will mark major milestones. The Osiris-Rex touchdown will be followed by the launch of another asteroid hunter on October 5. Both NASA’s spacecraft and its target – a metallic asteroid – are named Psyche. Then, a month later, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will encounter its first asteroid since lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2021. Lucy will pass Dinkinesh in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter on November 1. It’s a warm-up for Lucy’s unprecedented tour of the so-called Trojans, the swarms of asteroids that shadow Jupiter’s sun. Neither Psyche nor Lucy collect souvenirs, nor will Osiris-Rex on its next mission explore the Apophis asteroid in 2029.
OTHER SAMPLE RETURNS
This is NASA’s third sample return from deep space, not counting the hundreds of kilograms of moon rocks collected by the Apollo astronauts. The agency’s first robotic sampling ended in an explosion in 2004. A capsule containing solar wind particles crashed into the Utah desert and shattered, endangering the samples. Two years later, a US capsule containing comet dust landed intact. Japan’s first asteroid sample flight returned microscopic grains from the Itokawa asteroid in 2010. Its second trip yielded about 5 grams — a teaspoon — from the Ryugu asteroid in 2020. The Soviet Union carried lunar samples to Earth in the 1970s, and China returned the Moon. material in 2020.