OSIRIS-REx pattern return: What to anticipate

Securing the pattern

As quickly because the capsule touches down, OSIRIS-REx personnel will spring into motion from a close-by hangar, using 4 helicopters to the touchdown web site.

The first person to method the pattern capsule can be a army consultant who will be sure the world is protected by checking for any unexploded ordnance. A consultant from Lockheed Martin will examine the capsule’s temperature to make sure it has cooled off from its fiery descent.

The OSIRIS-REx workforce will take samples of the soil and air on the touchdown web site. These can be very important later if scientists detect the molecular precursors to life within the Bennu samples. By evaluating these essential findings with pattern web site readings, the workforce can make sure the samples don’t include Earthly contaminants.

Two workforce members will elevate the capsule, which weighs about 45 kilograms (100 kilos), right into a metallic crate. They’ll wrap the crate in protecting Teflon and a tarp earlier than bundling the entire thing right into a harness. A helicopter will hook onto the harness and transport it to a brief clear room in a close-by hangar. There, technicians will delicately open the pattern capsule and extract the small canister containing the dear Bennu samples.

The canister can be saved beneath a nitrogen purge to guard it from contamination. On Sept. 25, the day after touchdown, the samples can be flown to a particular curation lab at NASA’s Johnson Area Heart in Houston, Texas. JSC’s Astromaterials Analysis and Exploration Science division, which hosts quite a few different Photo voltaic System samples, will oversee initial curation of the OSIRIS-REx samples.

The pattern canister can be positioned inside a particular nitrogen glovebox and opened roughly 10 days after arrival at JSC. NASA says it would reveal the samples to the general public on Oct. 11.