OSIRIS-REx successfully returns samples from asteroid Bennu

On Sept. 24, 2023, a part of the asteroid belt hit Earth — safely below parachutes and inside a capsule. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Useful resource Identification, Safety-Regolith Explorer — higher generally known as OSIRIS-REx — has now efficiently dropped off its collected items of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.

The spacecraft’s six-year fundamental mission culminated with the morning re-entry of the pattern return capsule holding some eight ounces (227 grams) of primitive asteroid in its clutches. It landed on the Air Drive’s Utah Take a look at and Coaching Vary, which lies throughout the U.S. Military’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah’s West Desert.

At 4:42 A.M. native time, when the craft was nonetheless some 67,000 miles (107,825 kilometers) from Earth officers contemplating each the protection of restoration crews and the survivability of the capsule needed to make a name.  

It was a go. That’s when the pattern capsule launched from the primary spacecraft.

Protected touchdown

The desert — at turns rolling, flat, or rugged — is huge, dwelling to wild horses, golden eagles, greasewood, and fourwing saltbush. “It’s a good looking place to land a capsule,” mentioned Wealthy Burns, the mission’s challenge supervisor at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart in Baltimore, Maryland, in a press launch. He in contrast getting the capsule on the touchdown ellipse to throwing a dart and hitting a bull’s-eye from throughout a basketball courtroom.

The restoration motion started simply after the Solar got here up on a cold first full day of fall. 4 helicopters crammed the air with uneven roar and the scent of aviation gas as they took off from Dugway’s airfield, carrying the crew that may put together the capsule for transport.

In accordance with Sandy Freund, with Lockheed Martin mission operations, 4 hours handed between the discharge and re-entry at 27,000 mph (43,450 km/h), with the capsule pulling 30 Gs. However below the primary chutes, the capsule touched down at a mild 11 mph (18 km/h) at 8:52 A.M. MDT, just some toes from a gravel highway.

The restoration crew first visually inspected the capsule from a distance, taking exterior temperatures and testing for gases within the air and within the craft to find out whether or not it was protected for method (an unexploded bolt or ruptured battery wouldn’t have been welcome). They then wrapped the capsule and nestled it right into a cargo container. The meeting was put right into a cargo internet for a helicopter to ferry again to the air base, the capsule dangling on a 100-foot-long (30 meters) line.  

What ensued was a technical ballet. The helicopter landed outdoors a hangar the place, in an odd car parking zone, restoration crew rolled the capsule to the hangar on a specifically constructed cart. All through the method, personnel consulted one another, checked the capsule’s wrapping, after which, lastly, politely knocked twice to achieve entry. Inside, the craft was unwrapped so employees might to brush materials off the burnt shell and clear the rolling cart’s wheels so no desert grit made its method into the short-term clear room past.

Lastly, the cart was rolled up a brief steel ramp to the clear room’s sealed doorways. The capsule was fastidiously lifted right into a second cart fabricated from anodized aluminum, the colour of gold. This cart had been used for the Stardust cometary pattern return mission practically 20 years in the past, which landed on the identical website. Lockheed took it out of storage as a result of that capsule had been the identical measurement as OSIRIS-REx.

Solely then did a few of Bennu enter the clear room.

Mission success

The clear room, a steel and polycarbonate-window shed set on a concrete ground, had inside strain increased than the skin to forestall exterior contamination. NASA and mission logos flanked the entrance steel doorways. Sporting three layers, “absolutely bunnyed” personnel took off the capsule’s backshell and different gear. (The pattern retrieval unit is inside a canister, which itself is contained in the pattern return capsule.) They hooked up a nitrogen purge that can proceed to launch nitrogen — an inert gasoline — by way of the pattern canister being stowed in Houston. Aside from safely having the capsule in hand, attaching the purge was the day’s fundamental aim. It’s going to additional safeguard towards terrestrial contamination, mentioned Nicole Lunning, the crew’s curation lead.

As we speak, these valuable bits of Bennu are scheduled to fly on a cargo airplane to Ellington Air Drive Base in Houston. From there, it’ll be pushed to the Johnson House Heart’s Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Workplace. That’s the place processing of the pattern will start, culminating in its eventual distribution to researchers all over the world at 60 totally different labs.

Extra instantly, as quickly as Sept. 26, principal investigator Dante Lauretta tells Astronomy the crew will wipe the canister partitions for a “quick-look evaluation.” They’ll be in search of clays, carbonates, and iron oxides to see whether or not the distant sensing devices have been on level when characterizing Bennu’s composition from orbit.

Lauretta was additionally a part of the crew that sampled the Utah desert instantly across the touchdown website to characterize these supplies — grime, air, water, and so on. — in case any occurred to infiltrate the seal (an occasion he referred to as “unlikely”).

Choosing up items

OSIRIS-REx launched Sept. 8, 2016, as the primary U.S. asteroid sampling mission. It carried a set of devices together with the touch-and-go pattern acquisition mechanism, or TAGSAM. The mission additionally had planetary protection implications — as a near-Earth asteroid, Bennu has a small probability of hitting the planet within the subsequent century.

Bennu is, because the space crow flies, about 200 million miles (321 million km) away; OSIRIS-REx arrived two years after launch. On Oct. 20, 2020, the truck-sized spacecraft sampled the younger, 60-foot-wide (18 m) crater space Nightingale. Mud and pebbles have been blown about as OSIRIS-REx touched down; the TAGSAM itself blew nitrogen gasoline on the floor to usher materials into the pattern container. Contact pads on the sampling arm additionally collected tiny particles earlier than the craft backed off.

Finally, Lauretta says, the TAGSAM’s robotic arm really went into the asteroid some 20 inches (50 centimeters), as much as its elbow joint, packing the pattern mechanism and initially jamming the closure flap with a rock simply 1.2 inches (3 cm) huge. The crew was capable of stow the pattern within the return capsule every week later.

In spring 2021, OSIRIS-REx’s engines burned for dwelling. Earlier this month, the craft first made a remaining Earth-targeting burn, together with a later small course correction, bringing it into place to launch the capsule for re-entry.

Later, Lauretta referred to as the touchdown “pulse-pounding. Boy, did we stick that touchdown! It didn’t transfer, it didn’t roll, it didn’t bounce.” He says that in re-entry, the complete pattern might have been jostled a lot that “it might all be powder” by the point it landed — although that received’t have an effect on researchers’ capacity to investigate the supplies. Extra can be recognized quickly however he joked that his curation crew “wouldn’t let me shake it.”

Treasured cargo

About 1/3 mile (0.5 km) in diameter, Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid that has modified little in 4.5 billion years. Meteorites from carbonaceous asteroids are uncommon and invaluable, containing natural molecules, hydrocarbons and amino acids — parts vital for all times as we all know it. Some even have water.

Bennu’s samples can be much more pristine than these in meteorites. That’s as a result of the fabric received’t have traveled by way of Earth’s environment unprotected nor landed uncovered on the floor our of world, open to the weather for probably years earlier than discovery and retrieval.

OSIRIS-REx has now given us the biggest pattern returned from a physique past the Moon, in keeping with NASA planetary scientist Melissa Morris. The pattern will take us “again to the daybreak of the solar system,” says Lauretta, noting its materials incorporates the “seeds of life” and can assist illuminate how prebiotic chemistry finally bought us to life on Earth.

Lauretta thinks Bennu is about 10 p.c water (not liquid however locked up in rock), together with 5 p.c carbon by weight. He stresses there’s a “vanishingly small likelihood” there’s biotic materials. However the pattern might present the state that happens between an natural molecule and life itself.

Lauretta and others are significantly eager on the document of Bennu’s father or mother physique, which shaped only some million years after the origin of the solar system. That father or mother physique had hydrothermal deposits like these of Earth’s deep-ocean environments, in keeping with Lauretta. Its water helped kind such substances as clay. It may additionally have shaped long-chain natural molecules, together with amino acids, that are important for the formation of peptides. In all of the meteorites collected on Earth, just one, Lauretta says, has “a touch” of a easy peptide.

It might be a shocking first if the pattern materials yields such a discovery. Danny Glavin, Senior Scientist for Pattern Return at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart, says he and his crew can be in search of simply that lengthy shot. “It’s one of many first issues to search for,” he says, including, “we’re going to go after them laborious.”

Asteroid Autumn

Now the OSIRIS-APEX for Apophis Explorer, the mission is heading to that asteroid for a 2029 rendezvous. The 1,200-foot (370 m) world will come inside 20,000 miles (32,000 km) of Earth that yr, and researchers hope to check how Apophis is likely to be perturbed by the encounter. The crew additionally plans on utilizing the spacecraft’s thrusters to blow materials from the floor to check with onboard devices.

The golden age of asteroid analysis appears to be upon us. Two Japanese missions have beforehand retrieved asteroid samples, although not from a carbonaceous world like Bennu. The DART mission efficiently demonstrated planetary protection methods by shifting an asteroid’s orbit. Psyche will launch later this yr on a mission to a metallic asteroid, and NEO Surveyor, scheduled to launch in 2028, will hunt from space for probably hazardous asteroids.

With the Bennu pattern return and the upcoming the Psyche launch and Lucy flyby of Dinkinesh, NASA is looking this season “Asteroid Autumn.”

For Lauretta, this autumn is each busy and stuffed with aid. He cried when the primary chutes deployed, particularly because it was not clear that the drogue chutes had opened first. Quickly, he’ll get to investigate the samples, which NASA says can be safely protected within the occasion of a authorities shutdown.

However first: a mission celebration get together in Tucson. “We’re going to throw down,” he says.