Utah:
A NASA space capsule carrying a sample of rocky material plucked from the surface of an asteroid three years ago hurtled toward Earth this weekend, en route to a fiery plunge through the atmosphere and a parachute landing in the Utah desert on Sunday.
Weather forecasts were favorable and the OSIRIS-REx robotic spacecraft was on track to release the sample return capsule for final descent as planned, without the need for further adjustments to the flight path, NASA officials said at a news briefing on Friday.
Mission managers expect a “perfect” landing at the U.S. military’s sprawling Utah Test and Training Range west of Salt Lake City, said Sandra Freund, a program manager at Lockheed Martin, which designed and built the spacecraft.
The round, bubble gum-shaped capsule is expected to land by parachute at 10:55 a.m. EDT (1455 GMT), about 13 minutes after entering the top of the atmosphere at about 35 times the speed of sound, capping a seven-year journey is being closed. .
If successful, the OSIRIS-REx mission, a joint effort between NASA and University of Arizona scientists, would mark the third asteroid sample, and by far the largest, ever returned to Earth for analysis, following two similar missions of the Japanese Space Agency for the past 13 years.
OSIRIS-REx collected its specimen from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999 and classified as a ‘near-Earth object’ because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years. Scientists estimate the odds of it hitting Earth by the end of the 22nd century are 1 in 2,700.
Bennu is small as asteroids, with a diameter of just 500 meters – slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall, but tiny compared to the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that hit Earth some 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Like other asteroids, Bennu is an ancient remnant of the early Solar System, whose current chemistry and mineralogy have remained virtually unchanged since it formed some 4.5 billion years ago. It thus contains valuable clues to the origin and development of rocky planets like Earth, and may even contain organic molecules similar to those needed for life to evolve.
“We’re literally looking at geological materials that formed before the Earth even existed,” Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson, told reporters last month.
OSIRIS-REx was launched in September 2016 and reached Bennu in 2018, orbiting the asteroid for almost two years before venturing close enough to sink its robotic arm into the loose surface in a grab on October 20, 2020 -and-go maneuver.
The spacecraft began a 2.2 billion mile cruise back to Earth in May 2021.
The Bennu sample is estimated at 250 grams (8.8 ounces), which is much larger than the amount of material carried by asteroid Ryugu in 2020 and asteroid Itokawa in 2010.
Upon arrival, the new sample will be flown by helicopter to a clean room set up at the Utah test track for initial examination, and then transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to be broken up into smaller ones. specimens promised to about 200 scientists in the United States. 60 laboratories around the world.
The bulk of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is expected to continue on to explore yet another near-Earth asteroid.
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