Scientists predict that the planet will come within 20,000 miles of Earth by 2029.
Dugway:
A seven-year space journey culminates on Sunday when a NASA capsule lands in the Utah desert and brings back to Earth the largest asteroid samples ever collected.
Scientists have high hopes for the sample, saying it will provide a better understanding of the formation of our solar system and how Earth became habitable.
The Osiris-Rex probe’s final, fiery descent through Earth’s atmosphere will be dangerous, but the US space agency is hoping for a soft landing at around 9am local time (3pm GMT) at a military proving ground in the northwest of Utah.
Four years after its launch in 2016, the probe landed on the asteroid Bennu and collected about 250 grams of dust from its rocky surface.
Even that small amount, NASA says, should “help us better understand the types of asteroids that could threaten Earth” and shed light “on the earliest history of our solar system,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.
“This sample return is truly historic,” NASA scientist Amy Simon told AFP. “This will be the largest sample we have returned since the Apollo moon rocks were returned to Earth.
But the capsule’s return will require “a dangerous maneuver,” she acknowledged.
Osiris-Rex released the capsule early Sunday — from an altitude of more than 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) — about four hours before landing.
The fiery passage through the atmosphere will only occur in the final 13 minutes, as the capsule hurtles down at more than 27,000 miles per hour, with temperatures reaching 5,000 Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius).
The rapid descent, monitored by army sensors, will be slowed by two successive parachutes. If they fail to deploy correctly, a “hard landing” would ensue.
If it looked like the target zone (60 by 15 kilometers) might be missed, NASA controllers could decide at the last minute not to release the capsule.
But all systems go, as NASA’s Planetary Science Division posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Osiris-Rex released the capsule containing the asteroid sample at 1042 GMT.
“The capsule will descend through space for four hours, enter the atmosphere over California and land in Utah approximately 13 minutes later,” the report said.
The probe, after successfully releasing its payload, fired its engines and shifted its course away from Earth, NASA said, “en route” for a date with another asteroid known as Apophis.
Scientists predict that the planet will come within 20,000 miles of Earth by 2029.
– Japanese monsters –
Once the tire-sized capsule lands in Utah, a team wearing protective masks and gloves will place it in a net to be transported by helicopter to a temporary “clean room” nearby.
NASA wants this done quickly and carefully to avoid any contamination of the sample with desert sand, which would skew the test results.
The sample will be flown by plane to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday. There the box is opened in another ‘clean room’.
NASA plans to announce the first results at a press conference on October 11.
Most of the sample will be preserved for research by future generations. About a quarter will be used immediately in experiments, and a small amount will be sent to mission partners Japan and Canada.
Japan had previously given NASA a few grains of asteroid Ryugu after bringing 0.2 ounces of dust to Earth during the Hayabusa-2 mission in 2020. Ten years earlier, it had brought back a microscopic amount of another asteroid.
But Bennu’s sample is much larger, allowing for significantly more testing, Simon said.
– The origin story of the earth –
Asteroids are composed of the original materials of the solar system, which are about 4.5 billion years old, and have remained relatively intact.
They “can give us clues about how the solar system formed and evolved,” says Melissa Morris, Osiris-Rex program director.
“It’s our own origin story.”
By hitting Earth’s surface, “we believed that asteroids and comets delivered organic material, possibly water, that helped life flourish here on Earth,” Simon said.
Scientists believe Bennu, about 500 meters in diameter, is rich in carbon – a building block of life on Earth – and contains water molecules locked in minerals.
Bennu surprised scientists in 2020 when the probe sank into the ground during its brief contact with the asteroid’s surface, revealing an unexpectedly low density, like a kiddie pool filled with plastic balls.
Understanding its composition could be useful in the – distant – future.
Because there is a small, but not zero, chance (one in 2,700) that Bennu could catastrophically collide with Earth, but not until 2182.
But NASA successfully deviated an asteroid’s course last year by crashing a probe into it during a test, and it may have to repeat that exercise at some point — but with much higher stakes.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)