On Sunday morning, a brown-and-white capsule will shoot
through Earth’s atmosphere to drop off a cache of pristine space rock to a team
of eagerly waiting scientists and engineers.
اضافة اعلان
If successful, the sample return will be the end of a
seven-year mission by NASA called OSIRIS-REX — which stands for Origins,
Spectral Interpretation, Resources Identification, and Security-Regolith
Explorer — that launched in 2016. Researchers hope that the sample, taken from
an asteroid named Bennu, will reveal clues about the origins of our solar
system and the genesis of life on our planet.
When will OSIRIS-REX drop off the sample and how can I
watch?
The sample is expected to land Sunday in a Utah desert,
about 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, at 10:55 a.m. Eastern time (5:55 pm
GMT+03:00). NASA will livestream the arrival on its YouTube channel starting
around 10 a.m.
The OSIRIS-REX command team is scheduled earlier Sunday to
conduct a go-or-no-go poll to determine whether the spacecraft will release the
capsule.
If it’s a go, the capsule will be released at 6:42 a.m.
Eastern time and enter Earth’s atmosphere four hours later. A set of parachutes
will inflate soon after, slowing the capsule for a gentle touchdown.
The command team will vote against the capsule drop if it
sees a risk to people or property on the ground. If that happens, it plans to
divert the spacecraft’s path and attempt a second sample return in 2025.
What is the purpose of the OSIRIS-REX mission?
Bennu, like other asteroids, is a geological relic of the
swirling mixture of gas and dust from billions of years ago that eventually
coalesced into planets. Its regolith, or loose rock and dust sitting atop the
its surface, contains a memory of the origin and the evolution of our solar
system. One theory among planetary scientists is that asteroids like Bennu once
seeded Earth with the ingredients to form life.
But it is hard to study these concepts using pieces of
asteroids that have fallen to Earth, or meteorites. Instead, many scientists
turn their eyes (and their instruments) to space.
It is not the first time researchers have brought back bits
of the cosmos. In 2020, a mission led by the Japanese space agency JAXA
retrieved a few grams of regolith from a near-Earth asteroid named Ryugu. The
OSIRIS-REX mission team anticipates about half a pound of Bennu’s unsullied
asteroid dirt.
Why did the mission take so long?
OSIRIS-REX launched in 2016, embarking on a roundabout
series of fuel-efficient loops through the inner solar system. It arrived at
Bennu two years later.
The mission team spent two years surveying the asteroid,
searching for the safest location for OSIRIS-REX to grab regolith that it could
bring to Earth. In October 2020, the team used a tool that punched the surface
of Bennu and then bounced off like a pogo stick.
Six months later, OSIRIS-REX began the two-year journey
home.
What happens next?
Once retrieved, the capsule will be moved to a temporary
clean room at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range and then
transferred to a curation facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The sample team expects in October to reveal its first results to the world,
including Bennu’s composition and how it compares with material brought back
from other asteroids. Researchers will then spend the next two years conducting
a more robust investigation of the asteroid.
The spacecraft will have a second life. It will embark on a
second journey to visit Apophis, a similar near-Earth asteroid that is
predicted to pass by our planet in 2029, within one-tenth of the distance to
the moon. Information from the mission, named OSIRIS-APEX — where APEX means
Apophis Explorer — might be useful in mitigating hazardous encounters with
asteroids in the future.
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