NASA’s OSIRIS-REx is on its way back to Earth, bringing with it a piece of an asteroid named Bennu. By the 24th of September, the spacecraft will become the first mission in U.S. history that brought back materials from an asteroid and its sample capsule will land inside Utah’s desert.
After seven years in space, the intrepid mission had to carefully come down and get some dust and rocks from an asteroid. Now this same mission has a really tough challenge: shipping these samples back to Earth while protecting them from heat, vibrations, and dirt contamination.
Once the sample capsule lands, our team will have limited time to get it to a safe room before anything else. Mike Moreau from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland explained that they must act quickly.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is heading back with something special that it grabbed from asteroid Bennu. On the 24th of September, OSIRIS-REx will make history as the first American mission to bring a piece of an asteroid back home! All this was made possible by experts from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
In the following six months, the OSIRIS-REx team will practise how to take a sample from Utah and bring it to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. In that lab, scientists will open the sample they get and distribute it among the OSIRIS-REx team so they can analyze some of them while keeping the rest in storage for future use by other scientists.
Scientists from NASA Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are preparing the route for a spacecraft to fly close to Earth. In Denver, at Lockheed Martin, an special team is monitoring the spacecraft and getting ready to recuperate the sample container once it arrives. This summer, teams in Colorado and Utah will practice how they can take out the capsule without polluting it. At Johnson Space Center, experts are rehearsing how they can open up and manage the samples that come inside when they get them. On top of that, scientists on the research team are prepping their investigations so they know what to do with the material when it arrives.
The people on the OSIRIS-REx team have done a great job studying and collecting samples from Bennu, an asteroid. They got to this point because they took their time and prepared thoroughly for each step of the mission. They’re doing the same thing as they approach the last part of their work.
Asteroids are really old pieces from when planets were forming and they may have molecules in them that could start life. People have learned a lot by studying bits of asteroids that got to Earth naturally but, to find out if asteroids helped deliver those molecules here more than 4 billion years ago, scientists need to get some direct samples from outer space which don’t have anything else on it.
The rocks seen on Bennu are probably so fragile that they wouldn’t withstand traveling through Earth’s atmosphere as a meteorite. Dr. Jason Dworkin explains that there is water and biology all around us here on Earth, which may change the chemical makeup of a meteorite if it lands. But getting access to an unaltered sample from space could give insight into how our solar system formed!
On September 24th, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will complete its mission and drop off a capsule with material it collected from Bennu. The capsule has about one cup of Bennu’s stuff – 8.8 ounces (or 250 grams). This capsule will land within an area that is 37 miles wide and 9 miles long on some special ground owned by the Department of Defense in Utah.
NASA, engineering teams from different companies, and research centers are using computer simulations to make sure that when the spacecraft enters Earth’s atmosphere at 8:41 a.m. Mountain Time (MT), it will land back on earth in the right location 13 minutes later at 10:41 a.m. Eastern Time (ET). They take into account all sorts of things like weather, solar activity, and space debris while they plan navigation routes.
After the sample return capsule lands, special recovery teams are sent out to secure the site and take the capsule to a special place called a ‘portable clean room’. They’ll collect dirt and air samples from around it too. This will help them make sure no small contaminants have touched the asteroid sample.
Once the capsule is in the special room, a team of workers will take away its heat shield, back shell, and other pieces to get it ready for taking to Houston.
After twelve years of hard work between NASA and its partners, they are finally bringing samples back from the asteroid Bennu. This is a big deal because these samples are really special, being very old pieces of material that come from the early time of our solar system. Scientists from all over the world will start exploring them.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is in charge of managing the OSIRIS-REx mission and making sure it’s safe. The University of Arizona, Tucson is leading the science team and helping to plan out how they’re going to observe things and track data. Lockheed Martin Space in Colorado built the spacecraft used for the mission, while Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating it. When the samples come back to Earth, they’ll be processed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. There’s even help from some other countries – Canada has an instrument called OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter on board and Japan is working with them through their Hayabusa2 mission so that scientists can study samples from asteroids too! OSIRIS-REx is a part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program which was created by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and runs under Washington’s Science Mission Directorate.
