Fragments of the asteroid, which may tell us about the early stages of the 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and the possible origins of water on our planet, will land in the Utah desert on Sunday.

This is the moment more than a decade of preparation for the NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx. Its aim was to collect large samples of rock and dust from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu and deliver it to our planet for analysis. The spacecraft successfully claimed its reward in 2020 and will eventually fly past Earth this weekend, dropping off a sample capsule and sending it to Utah.

“This is absolutely the moment we’ve all been waiting for,” said Laurie Glaze, director of the Planetary Sciences Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The sample will help scientists get an idea of ​​what materials were present when our solar system first formed. Researchers believe that asteroids like Bennu have not changed much since the birth of our cosmic neighborhood. They plan to study the excavated rocks and use the mission to inform future research.

“We believe that asteroids could be the source material not only to form the rocky parts of our planet, but also to distribute the water that makes up our hydrological system,” Glaze said. said.

Scientists don’t know exactly how many samples are inside the container, but they suspect it is the largest sample ever collected from an asteroid, weighing about 250 grams, or the size of a hamster. This will give them more pieces to analyze than ever before.

OSIRIS-REx collected more rock and material than expected, so much so that it jammed the spacecraft’s sample collector and some of it was ejected into space. NASA decided not to measure the sample and instead immediately stored the rocks for safe keeping.

The spacecraft left Bennu with the sample in 2021 and has since headed towards Earth. By Sunday morning, OSIRIS-REx will be 63,000 miles (101,388.67 km) from Earth and will begin the last and not entirely safe leg of its journey.

First, the probe will launch a sample container about the size of a tire into space. If the container is not thrown into the sea as planned and becomes trapped inside the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, the team will have to wait until September 2025 to try again. The spacecraft will need to fly around the Sun once more to get close to Earth.

If all goes well, it will head towards the planet from there and take about four hours to reach Earth’s atmosphere. It is impossible to control the capsule at this time. “Once we launch it, it will just be a ballistic object,” said Sandy Freund, Lockheed Martin OSIRIS-REx program manager.

The container will enter the atmosphere at about 27,000 miles per hour and heat up to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It has a heat shield, a critical piece of equipment designed to prevent the sample from catching fire, which could end the mission.

“This is really the worst-case scenario,” Freund said. “Your samples are completely gone.”

As the capsule descends, it will release a braking parachute to hold it in a stable position, followed by another parachute to slow it down. If all goes as planned, the capsule will make a soft landing in Utah at 10 to 11 mph (about 18 km/h). In the unlikely scenario that the parachutes do not open and the capsule does not slow down, the samples will still be able to reach the ground.

“We are prepared for a hard landing scenario,” Freund said. “It’s not perfect, but aren’t the patterns on the floor? “They’re not as pure as the team wants, but they’re still here.”

From there, a helicopter will tow it by cable to a clean room, where a nitrogen purging process will purge it of any possible contamination. It will then travel to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the prototype will be unveiled to the public in October.

Despite the potential obstacles, Freund says he’s confident he and his team can complete the mission. They had a few rehearsals before Sunday to prepare for the fall. In the autumn, the container will be monitored by numerous aircraft as well as radars in the region. The team also improved the technology used in past sample return missions.

“We’ve inherited a lot, and we’re very fortunate to be able to do this,” Freund said.

OSIRIS-REx could also help provide information for future missions to asteroids; perhaps even for those who use these rocks as resources.

“In the future, people were talking about using asteroids as resources that we could exploit,” Glaze said. “I think the OSIRIS-REx operations on the outskirts of Bennu are really informative about how something like this could actually be done.” Source