NASA’s Groundbreaking Asteroid Mission to Make Risky Return

The anticipated conclusion of NASA’s inaugural mission to collect an asteroid sample and bring it back to the United States is set to occur on Sunday, as the spacecraft descends into the treacherous terrain of the Utah desert.

Scientists hope the material – possibly the most ever found by such a mission – will give humanity a better understanding of how our solar system formed and how Earth became habitable.

The US space probe OSIRIS-REx, launched in 2016, took a sample from an asteroid called Bennu almost three years ago.

The touchdown is scheduled for Sunday around 9:00 a.m. local time (1500 GMT) at a military test site in the western state.

About four hours earlier, about 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) from Earth, the Osiris-Rex probe releases a capsule containing a sample.

The final descent will take 13 minutes: the capsule will enter the atmosphere at about 27,000 miles (43,000 kilometers) per hour and reach a maximum temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 degrees Celsius), NASA said.

If all goes well, two successive parachutes will bring the capsule to a soft landing on the desert floor, where it will be picked up by pre-positioned personnel.

Hitting the 250-square-mile (650-square-kilometer) target area is like “throwing a dart the length of a basketball court and hitting the pole,” NASA’s OSIRIS-REx project manager, Rich Burns, told a news conference last month.

The night before landing, air traffic controllers have one last chance to abort if the conditions are not right. If so, the probe would orbit the Sun before its next attempt – in 2025.

“Sample recovery missions are difficult. There are many things that can go wrong,” said Sandra Freund, Lockheed Martin’s OSIRIS-REx program manager.

Teams have carefully prepared for the capsule’s return — even a “hard landing scenario,” according to Freund — to preserve the asteroid material in its pristine form.

The last general exercise was held in August, when a replica capsule was dropped from the helicopter.

Once the capsule is on the ground, the team checks its condition before placing it in a net, which is lifted by helicopter and taken to a temporary “clean room”.

The next day, the sample is flown to a highly specialized laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Scientists open the capsule and separate the pieces of rock and dust over the course of days.

Some of the sample is now for research, and the rest is stored for future generations with better technology – a practice first started during the Apollo missions to the Moon.

NASA is expected to announce the first results at a press conference on October 11.

Obtaining the sample involved a high-risk operation in October 2020: the probe came into contact with the asteroid for a few seconds, and an explosion of compressed nitrogen was released to lift the dust sample, which was then collected.

Bennu had surprised the researchers during sampling: during the few seconds it was in contact with the surface, the probe’s arm had sunk into the soil, revealing a much lower density than expected.

However, it allowed NASA to take much more than the original goal of 60 grams — the agency believes the sample could be up to about 250 grams of material.

That mass would be “the largest outside the orbit of the moon,” NASA program manager Melissa Morris said.

The first samples brought to Earth by asteroids were taken by Japanese probes in 2010 and 2020, and the latter was found to contain uracil, one of the building blocks of RNA.

The discovery added weight to a long-held theory that life on Earth may have been seeded from outer space when asteroids crashed into our planet carrying basic elements.

Asteroids like Bennu and Ryugu, one of the asteroids being studied by Japan, may look similar but “can be very, very different,” according to Morris.

Asteroids are interesting because they are composed of the original materials of the solar system.

The cup of rocks may contain “clues we believe to some of the deepest questions we asked ourselves as humans,” said University of Arizona in Tucson’s Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REX principal investigator.

The samples may represent “the seeds of life that these asteroids delivered at the beginning of our planet, leading to this incredible biosphere, biological evolution, and the fact that we are here today.”

Bennu, 500 meters in diameter, orbits the Sun and approaches Earth every six years.

There is a small chance (1 in 2700) that it will collide with Earth in 2182, which would have a catastrophic effect.

NASA has been investigating ways to alter the asteroid’s trajectory, so a better understanding of Bennu’s composition could be useful.