First NASA asteroid sample return mission on track for fall ’23 delivery

NASA’s first asteroid pattern return spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, fired its thrusters for 30 seconds on Sept. 21 and nudged its trajectory towards Earth. The ensuing course correction retains the car on monitor to ship a pattern of asteroid Bennu to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, finishing a seven-year mission.

The supply itself, nevertheless, will not be a easy parcel drop on Earth’s entrance doorstep: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx—formally the Origins Spectral Interpretation Useful resource Identification Safety—Regolith Explorer—should strategy Earth at a exact velocity and route to ship its pattern return capsule into Earth’s ambiance. “If the capsule is angled too excessive, it can skip off the ambiance,” mentioned Mike Moreau, OSIRIS-REx deputy undertaking supervisor at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Angled too low, it can dissipate in Earth’s ambiance.”

To make sure a secure supply, “Over the following 12 months, we’ll regularly alter the OSIRIS-REx trajectory to focus on the spacecraft nearer to Earth,” mentioned Daniel Wibben, trajectory-and-maneuver design lead with KinetX Inc. “Now we have to cross Earth’s orbit on the time that Earth might be at that very same location.” Wibben works carefully with the Lockheed Martin group in Littleton, Colorado, that flies the spacecraft.

Final month’s maneuver was the primary time the OSIRIS-REx group modified the spacecraft’s trajectory because it left Bennu on Might 10, 2021. Following this course adjustment, OSIRIS-REx would cross about 1,367 miles (2,200 kilometers) from Earth. A collection of maneuvers starting in July 2023 will deliver OSIRIS-REx even nearer, to 155 miles (250 kilometers) off the floor, shut sufficient to launch its pattern capsule for a precision touchdown—through parachute on the Air Pressure’s Utah Check and Coaching Vary within the Nice Salt Lake Desert.

Asteroids can act as time capsules, preserving the earliest historical past of our solar system and presumably even chemical signatures of the ancestorial constructing blocks of life—one thing scientists may study extra about by finding out the Bennu samples within the lab. With simply lower than a 12 months to go, the mission group is already making ready for the pattern’s arrival.

NASA is working carefully with the Air Pressure and Military to apply capsule retrieval and transport to onsite services on the Utah vary.

NASA’s Johnson House Heart in Houston constructed a brand new curation lab particularly to retailer the pattern. Engineers and curation consultants are designing specialised gloveboxes, instruments, and storage containers to protect the pattern in pristine situation.

Johnson will oversee distribution of pattern parts to scientists worldwide. The space center will even retain and protect a big fraction of what OSIRIS-REx returns for future generations to check. That is much like the strategy employed with Apollo Moon samples, a few of that are solely now being opened for examination with know-how that did not exist when the lunar missions returned them a long time in the past.

NASA launched OSIRIS-REx on Sept. 8, 2016. The spacecraft arrived at Bennu in December 2018, then surveyed the asteroid for greater than two years. On Oct. 20, 2020, the spacecraft collected a pattern from the asteroid and stowed it in its pattern return capsule.

After OSIRIS-REx returns this pattern to Earth, the spacecraft continues on an prolonged mission below the title “OSIRIS-APEX” to asteroid Apophis.