Imagine parallel parking a 15-passenger van into merely two to some parking areas surrounded by two-story boulders. On Oct. 20, a Faculty of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years inside the making will strive the astronomical equal larger than 200 million miles away.
A NASA mission known as OSIRIS-REx will shortly attempt to the contact the ground of an asteroid and purchase free rubble.
OSIRIS-REx is america’ first asteroid sample return mission, aiming to assemble and carry a pristine, unaltered sample from an asteroid once more to Earth for scientific analysis. The spacecraft will attempt to the contact the ground of the asteroid Bennu, which is hurtling by means of space at 63,000 miles per hour. If all goes in response to plan, the spacecraft will deploy an 11-foot-long robotic arm known as TAGSAM – Contact-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism – and spend about 10 seconds accumulating not lower than two ounces of free rubble from the asteroid. The spacecraft, monitored remotely by a employees of scientists and engineers, will then stow away the sample and begin its return to Earth, scheduled for 2023.
You can watch this sample assortment “Contact-And-Go” maneuver Oct. 20 at 5 p.m. EDT/ 2 p.m. PDT on NASA Television and the corporate’s web page.
As senior vp for evaluation and innovation at UArizona and a mechanical engineer with a protracted career in space strategies engineering, I think about this milestone for OSIRIS-REx captures fully the spirit of research and innovation, the cautious stability of problem-solving and perseverance, of obstacle and various.
What Bennu can practice us
In 2004, Michael Drake, then head of the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory; his protégé, Dante Lauretta, then a UArizona assistant professor of planetary science; and specialists from Lockheed Martin and NASA talked about the very earliest thought of the OSIRIS-REx mission and what it’d receive.
Asteroids are relics of the earliest provides that formed our photograph voltaic system, and discovering out such a sample might allow scientists to answer elementary questions regarding the origins of the photograph voltaic system. Extra, Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid with attainable menace of impacting the Earth inside the late 2100s, so the mission can be exploring strategies via which such a collision is probably prevented.
Perhaps, though, most likely probably the most formidable goal of the OSIRIS-REx mission is beneficial useful resource identification – the “RI” in OSIRIS. This suggests, primarily, mapping the chemical properties of Bennu to be taught, amongst completely different points, regarding the potential for mining asteroids to offer rocket gasoline – a notion which, in 2004, was far ahead of its time.
NASA chosen UArizona to steer the mission in 2011, with Drake on the helm. Lauretta, a first-generation faculty scholar and UArizona alumnus, took over when Drake died that yr and continues to steer OSIRIS-REx proper now. He would unquestionably make his predecessor proud.
Whereas OSIRIS-REx is the first NASA mission to attempt to collect a sample from an asteroid, the scientific and technological knowledge requisite of such a mission is the outcomes of a few years of prior exploration. Inside the early Nineties, NASA’s Galileo flew earlier the asteroids Gaspra and Ida. NEAR Shoemaker was the first human-made object to orbit and land on an asteroid. Sooner than heading for the dwarf planet Ceres in 2012, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbited and mapped extensively the asteroid Vesta.
And perhaps most significantly, in 2010, the Japanese counterpart of NASA, JAXA, returned to Earth a small amount of mud from an asteroid via its Hayabusa spacecraft. Early last yr, JAXA’s Hayabusa 2 landed on and effectively collected a sample from the asteroid Ryugu. The spacecraft will return to Earth in December of this yr. It has been a privilege and an absolute delight to look at and be taught from the accomplishments of our colleagues in Japan.
Navigating the sudden
OSIRIS-REx launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sept. 8, 2016, and arrived at Bennu in December 2018. Inside the months principal as a lot as this second, its employees of scientists and engineers has remotely carried out two rehearsals, getting very near to Bennu with out touching it.
When the OSIRIS-REx employees chosen Bennu as its purpose, it suspected and hoped that the asteroid’s flooring would look one factor like a sandy seashore. Nevertheless the scientific course of – and nature itself – is stuffed with surprises, some tough, all wondrous. As a result of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft approached Bennu, its suite of high-resolution cameras beamed a complete lot of pictures of the asteroid once more to Earth, revealing not a beachlike flooring, nonetheless a rugged, boulder-strewn panorama.
This was not exactly inside the plan.
The employees pored over these footage for months, in search of a web page every massive enough for a spacecraft the size of a giant passenger van to the contact down and maneuver with out hitting a boulder and containing supplies high-quality enough to provide free rubble to assemble.
On Dec. 12, 2019, the OSIRIS-REx employees launched the chosen landing web page: Nightingale. Nightingale is dwelling to a relatively new crater the size of a tennis court docket docket. At its edge lies a boulder the size of a two-story establishing. The employees, which includes a entire lot of college, researchers and faculty college students from UArizona and numerous different confederate institutions, affectionately refers to this boulder as “Mount Doom.”
In a single small a part of Nightingale’s crater – the size of just a few parking areas – the employees acknowledged free rubble small enough for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to grab and carry away.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
Points may go mistaken on Oct. 20.
Apart from crashing into Mount Doom, completely different a lot much less dramatic, additional doable risks lurk. The TAGSAM collector head may land on a rock, perched at an angle, comparatively than flush in opposition to a flat flooring of rubble, making its assortment far a lot much less environment friendly. On account of the collector head can accommodate particles solely the size of a nickel or smaller, there’s moreover the prospect of it being efficiently “clogged” by one factor greater. In uncharted territory, points don’t on a regular basis go in response to plan.
Nonetheless, we’re optimistic.
The age-old adage rings true: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We already have gained loads knowledge from the OSIRIS-REx mission, and we’ll proceed exploring and downside fixing with the similar daring willpower that has taken us up to now.
This textual content is republished from The Dialog beneath a Creative Commons license.