Hey NASA, you have simply landed your first samples from an asteroid! The place are they going subsequent?
Houston, after all.
Wrapping up a seven-year-long, almost four-billion-mile (6.4 billion kilometers) journey to the asteroid Bennu and again, the U.S. house company’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft deployed its pattern return capsule (SRC) to land within the Utah desert on Sunday (Sept. 24). A crew of NASA scientists and Lockheed Martin engineers had been on web site inside a minute of the landing to start the method of retrieving the capsule and about half a pound (8.8 ounces or 250 grams) of rocks and soil that’s estimated to be on board.
After guaranteeing the world was away from any unexploded ordinance, the capsule landed as deliberate throughout the Division of Protection’s Utah Check and Coaching Vary (UTTR) — and when the well-traveled {hardware} was secure to method, the crew started securing the capsule and loading it right into a cradle. The latter was essential as a result of it allowed the capsule to quickly be hoisted by a helicopter and brought to a brief clear room at UTTR.
“Once we first come into the hangar, the crew there’ll unbag the SRC and attempt to clear off a few of the filth and mud that that it might need picked up. We will not get it pristinely clear, however we are able to knock off large hunks of the desert ground,” Richard Witherspoon, Lockheed Martin’s OSIRIS-REx floor restoration lead, stated in an interview with House.com. “And they’ll take scrapings from the warmth protect and again shell at the moment, which is able to go off for later evaluation.”
Associated: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey
As soon as contained in the clear room, the SRC will begin getting disassembled. By this level, there’s an opportunity scientists will get their very first take a look at samples from Bennu.
“We’re by no means anticipating to reveal any pattern whereas we’re within the cleanroom at UTTR. The one factor that is likely to be completely different although, is once we stowed the touch-and-go pattern acquisition mechanism (TAGSAM) within the SRC [while still in orbit around Bennu], we did so shortly as a result of the it was actually overflowing with regolith [soil] and the mylar flap that was purported to be a a method valve was held open by a really giant rock,” Witherspoon stated. “So it is attainable that whereas we had been stowing the TAGSAM, just a little little bit of the regolith might need escaped and gotten trapped inside the SRC.”
If that’s the case, the crew will rigorously gather the escaped materials whereas nonetheless in Utah.
Engineers will then take away the SRC’s warmth protect and backshell so the 2 might be trucked to Lockheed Martin’s amenities in Denver for evaluation. That work will even expose the “avionics deck” for what is likely to be a very powerful step of this preliminary work.
“We have to get the samples underneath a nitrogen purge,” Witherspoon stated. “There is a spot on the avionics deck the place we are going to push in a needle by means of which we circulation ultra-high purity nitrogen. That creates a constructive stress that [prevents Earth’s atmosphere from flowing in and contaminating the sample].”
The crew will then wrap up the avionics deck and place the whole meeting right into a transport container earlier than retiring for the day.
From outer house to Houston
Early Monday morning (Sept. 25), the crew will come collectively as soon as extra to load the partially disassembled capsule onto a C-17 army transport airplane for an 8:00 a.m. MDT (10:00 a.m. EDT or 1400 GMT) flight to Ellington Subject in Houston.
“As soon as on the bottom in Texas, we load all the gear onto a field truck and caravan from Ellington Subject to Johnson House Heart,” Witherspoon stated. “We’ve a police escort whereas we’re doing that, simply in case there may be visitors, however we’re touchdown and transferring earlier than rush hour begins in Houston.”
Upon arriving at Constructing 31 — the identical facility that homes the vast majority of moon rocks introduced again by Apollo astronauts in addition to different astromaterials collected by NASA missions — the OSIRIS-REx payload can be positioned in a pair of cleanrooms.
“Within the first cleanroom, we take off one of many layers of bagging, we clear all the things and we get it onto the nitrogen purge that’s inside that lab. Then that is a secure place to go away the pattern in a single day if we have to,” Witherspoon stated. “However then both we are going to proceed on that day or on Tuesday morning and transfer to the upstairs lab, which is named the OSIRIS-REx Curation Lab and was specifically constructed for this mission.”
The brand new curation laboratory has specialised gloveboxes for dealing with each the Bennu samples in addition to the {hardware} used to seize materials from the asteroid’s floor and ship it to Earth.
“As soon as the avionics deck goes into the glovebox, there may be one remaining step that Lockheed engineers do and that’s to open and take the lid off of the science canister, which then exposes the TAGSAM,” Witherspoon stated. “We carry that off and put it right into a particular fixture that curation gave us after which that’s once we are executed. We again away, we go away the room and the NASA-led curation crew is available in and begins the disassembly of all of the parts.”
Pattern examine
NASA anticipates it’ll take a number of weeks from the purpose the lid is opened for the crew to rigorously and methodically absolutely disassemble the {hardware} to disclose the pristine asteroid inside.
“As soon as that happens, we are going to begin to characterize the pattern, perceive higher what now we have, how a lot now we have and what number of completely different rock sorts and lithologies there is likely to be throughout the pattern,” Kevin Righter, NASA’s curator for the Bennu materials, stated throughout a pre-landing press briefing. “That characterization can be used to find out the fabric that we allocate to our worldwide companions from JAXA [Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency] and the Canadian House Company, in addition to figuring out what materials can be acceptable to allocate to the science crew for his or her research.”
It’s believed the Bennu pattern will assist us learn the way our photo voltaic system and planets developed. The returned materials will assist scientists examine planet formation and the origin of organics which will have led to life on Earth, therefore the “O” within the mission’s full identify, “Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Useful resource Identification and Safety–Regolith Explorer” (OSIRIS-REx).
“We imagine that we’re bringing again representatives of the seeds of life that the asteroids delivered firstly of our planet, which led to this wonderful biosphere, organic evolution and to us being right here at this time to look again on that tremendous historical past to consider the place did we come from and the place are we going,” stated Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission on the College of Arizona, Tucson.
NASA has scheduled a press convention for Oct. 11 to offer a primary take a look at the samples and the preliminary findings by its science crew.
