Topline
Samples from a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid will land in Utah this Sunday, the first U.S. mission of its kind that could potentially give scientists more insight into the origins of life and the solar system.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will land on Earth this Sunday, September 24, seven years after launching … [+]
Key Facts
NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx for short, is the first spacecraft to return with an asteroid sample collection in the U.S.
Launched on September 8, 2016, the autonomous spacecraft collected samples of rocks and dust, or regolith, from Bennu, an at least 4.5-billion-year-old, carbon-rich asteroid scientists believe may be like the one that “may have delivered water and organic compounds (the building blocks of all known life) to Earth by colliding with it early in its history,” according to NASA.
Samples were collected on October 20, 2020, and the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft carrying the sample is estimated to land near the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range at 10:55 a.m. EDT Sunday.
Coming in at about 8.8 ounces, this sample is expected to be the largest asteroid sample Earth has ever received, and its arrival can be viewed live on NASA’s YouTube channel, website or NASA TV.
Big Number
$1.16 billion. That’s how much the Planetary Society estimated the OSIRIS-REx mission cost.
Key Background
Launched in 2016, the spacecraft arrived near Bennu in 2018 and spent two years orbiting, observing and mapping out the terrain of the asteroid for the sample collection. Bennu’s surface was a lot rockier and rougher than OSIRIS-REx was designed to land on, forcing scientists to essentially retrain the autonomous spacecraft to land on the surface without harming it, Professor Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission, told Space.com. After finding a safe landing bed using 3-D photography, the spacecraft unleashed its robotic arm to collect material from Bennu and charted its return to Earth in May 2021. It will deploy a capsule containing the sample this Sunday, September 24. A recovery team is charged with recovering the sample canister and transporting it to NASA’S Johnson Space Center in Houston for distribution and analysis. Portions of the sample will be shared with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency–which charted the world’s first two asteroid sample collection and return missions–and the Canadian Space Agency.
Surprising Fact
Bennu is calculated to have a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth in September 2182, more motive for scientists to learn how to defend the planet against potential impact.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/darreonnadavis/2023/09/22/what-to-know-about-nasas-osiris-rex-mission/