NASA is celebrating tonight after the OSAIS-RES spacecraft successfully touched the Benue asteroid in a bid to collect rock and dust samples from its surface. This is the first time for the space agency to do such a feat.
Hustling through space more than 200 million miles from Earth, the difficult "touch and go" maneuver involved spacecraft making brief contact with the asteroid to grab at least 60 grams of material.
If the team determines the collection process to be a success, then the next step is to bring the samples to Earth for scientific analysis. If the spacecraft failed to collect a substantial amount of material, a second attempt would be made in January 2021. We should know the result next week.
Because Benue is believed to have formed in the first 10 million years of our solar system's existence - 4.5 billion years ago - scientists hope that the samples collected can unlock the mystery of how it happened, and even Tell us more about the origin of life.
Even while rotating at a speed of 500 meters (about the size of the Empire State Building) and traveling at a speed of 63,000 mph, Bennu's mission to take the spacecraft to the surface has been a major challenge for NASA, which has Mission was launched in 2016 from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
After a series of maneuvers, which vigorously hit the spacecraft out of orbit around Bennettu, it extended its robot, descending approximately half a mile (805 m) toward the surface of the asteroid.
Four hours later, at an elevation of about 410 feet (125 m), the spacecraft carried out the first of two maneuvers, which allowed the sample collection site called Nightingale to be properly targeted.
Ten minutes after that, the spacecraft made a second maneuver to slow down its descent and match the asteroid's rotation at the time of contact.
"It then continues a treacherous, 11-minute coastline into a boulder the size of a two-story building, named 'Mount Doom', to touch on a clear spot in a pit in the northern hemisphere of Benue is." "The size of a small parking lot, the Nightingale site is one of the few relatively obvious locations of this unexpectedly boulder-covered space rock."
As the robot's hand made contact with the surface, it caused the explosion of nitrogen gas to blow up dust and pebbles, some of which have been caught by hope. After the collection attempt, OSIRIS-REx fired off its thrusters and moved safely away from the surface. "
Thomas Zerbuchen, Associate Administrator at NASA's Science Mission Directorate, described Tuesday's touch-and-go mission as "an incredible feat," today with our mysterious ancient storytellers for science and engineering and future missions Has advanced our possibilities to study. " Of the solar system. A piece of primordial rock that has seen the entire history of our solar system may now be ready to come home to generations of scientific discovery, and we can't wait to see what comes next. "
Any sample collected by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is expected to hit Earth in 2023.
In a similar effort, Japan's space agency, which collected subsurface samples for the first time last year from an asteroid about 200 million miles away, should see the material return to Earth in December 2020.
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