On Sept. 10, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly fired its ACS (attitude control system) thrusters to level itself towards Earth, placing it on the right track to launch its pattern capsule, carrying rocks and dust from asteroid Bennu, from 63,000 miles (or 102,000 kilometers) above Earth’s floor on Sunday, Sept. 24.
Yesterday’s trajectory-correction maneuver modified the spacecraft’s velocity a couple of ½ mph (lower than 1 kph) relative to Earth. With out this tiny however vital shift, the spacecraft and its asteroid cargo would have flown previous Earth.
However now, the spacecraft is about as much as launch the capsule to enter the environment simply off the coast of California at 8:42 a.m. MDT / 10:42 a.m. EDT.
Touring at a exact pace and angle, it’ll land roughly 13 minutes after launch in a 36-mile by 8.5-mile (58-kilometer by 14-kilometer) predetermined space on the Division of Protection’s Utah Take a look at and Coaching Vary southwest of Salt Lake Metropolis.
In the meantime, about 20 minutes after releasing the pattern capsule, the spacecraft will hearth its engines to divert previous Earth and onto its subsequent mission to asteroid Apophis: OSIRIS-APEX (OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer).
OSIRIS-REx might hearth its thrusters once more on Sept. 17 if engineers decide that one last adjustment to its trajectory is important earlier than it releases its capsule every week later.
The spacecraft is at the moment 4 million miles, or 7 million kilometers, away, touring at about 14,000 mph (about 23,000 kph) towards Earth.
Quotation:
OSIRIS-REx adjusts course to focus on pattern capsule’s touchdown zone (2023, September 12)
retrieved 12 September 2023
from https://phys.org/information/2023-09-osiris-rex-adjusts-sample-capsule-zone.html
This doc is topic to copyright. Other than any truthful dealing for the aim of personal research or analysis, no
half could also be reproduced with out the written permission. The content material is supplied for data functions solely.
