The OSIRIS-REx pattern return capsule arrived safely on the bottom Sept. 24. Credit score: NASA/Keegan Barber
On Sept. 24, 2023, a part of the asteroid belt hit Earth — safely beneath parachutes and inside a capsule. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Useful resource Identification, Safety-Regolith Explorer — higher referred to as OSIRIS-REx — has now efficiently dropped off its collected items of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
The spacecraft’s six-year essential mission culminated with the morning re-entry of the pattern return capsule holding some eight ounces (227 grams) of primitive asteroid in its clutches. It landed on the Air Power’s Utah Take a look at and Coaching Vary, which lies inside the U.S. Military’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah’s West Desert.
At 4:42 A.M. native time, when the craft was nonetheless some 67,000 miles (107,825 kilometers) from Earth officers contemplating each the protection of restoration crews and the survivability of the capsule needed to make a name.
It was a go. That’s when the pattern capsule launched from the principle spacecraft.
Secure touchdown
The desert — at turns rolling, flat, or rugged — is huge, dwelling to wild horses, golden eagles, greasewood, and fourwing saltbush. “It’s a gorgeous place to land a capsule,” mentioned Wealthy Burns, the mission’s undertaking supervisor at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Baltimore, Maryland, in a press launch. He in contrast getting the capsule on the touchdown ellipse to throwing a dart and hitting a bull’s-eye from throughout a basketball courtroom.
The restoration motion started simply after the Solar got here up on a cold first full day of fall. 4 helicopters crammed the air with uneven roar and the odor of aviation gas as they took off from Dugway’s airfield, carrying the workforce that will put together the capsule for transport.
In keeping with Sandy Freund, with Lockheed Martin mission operations, 4 hours handed between the discharge and re-entry at 27,000 mph (43,450 km/h), with the capsule pulling 30 Gs. However beneath the principle chutes, the capsule touched down at a delicate 11 mph (18 km/h) at 8:52 A.M. MDT, only a few toes from a gravel street.
The restoration workforce first visually inspected the capsule from a distance, taking exterior temperatures and testing for gases within the air and within the craft to find out whether or not it was protected for method (an unexploded bolt or ruptured battery wouldn’t have been welcome). They then wrapped the capsule and nestled it right into a cargo container. The meeting was put right into a cargo web for a helicopter to ferry again to the air base, the capsule dangling on a 100-foot-long (30 meters) line.
What ensued was a technical ballet. The helicopter landed outdoors a hangar the place, in an odd parking zone, restoration crew rolled the capsule to the hangar on a specifically constructed cart. All through the method, personnel consulted one another, checked the capsule’s wrapping, after which, lastly, politely knocked twice to realize entry. Inside, the craft was unwrapped so employees might to brush materials off the burnt shell and clear the rolling cart’s wheels so no desert grit made its means into the non permanent clear room past.
Lastly, the cart was rolled up a brief steel ramp to the clear room’s sealed doorways. The capsule was fastidiously lifted right into a second cart fabricated from anodized aluminum, the colour of gold. This cart had been used for the Stardust cometary pattern return mission practically 20 years in the past, which landed on the identical web site. Lockheed took it out of storage as a result of that capsule had been the identical dimension as OSIRIS-REx.
Solely then did a few of Bennu enter the clear room.
Mission success
The clear room, a steel and polycarbonate-window shed set on a concrete ground, had inside strain greater than the skin to stop exterior contamination. NASA and mission logos flanked the entrance steel doorways. Carrying three layers, “totally bunnyed” personnel took off the capsule’s backshell and different tools. (The pattern retrieval unit is inside a canister, which itself is contained in the pattern return capsule.) They connected a nitrogen purge that can proceed to launch nitrogen — an inert fuel — by the pattern canister being stowed in Houston. Other than safely having the capsule in hand, attaching the purge was the day’s essential objective. It would additional safeguard in opposition to terrestrial contamination, mentioned Nicole Lunning, the workforce’s curation lead.
At this time, these valuable bits of Bennu are scheduled to fly on a cargo aircraft to Ellington Air Power Base in Houston. From there, it’ll be pushed to the Johnson House Middle’s Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Workplace. That’s the place processing of the pattern will start, culminating in its eventual distribution to researchers all over the world at 60 completely different labs.
Extra instantly, as quickly as Sept. 26, principal investigator Dante Lauretta tells Astronomy the workforce will wipe the canister partitions for a “quick-look evaluation.” They’ll be on the lookout for clays, carbonates, and iron oxides to see whether or not the distant sensing devices had been on level when characterizing Bennu’s composition from orbit.
Lauretta was additionally a part of the workforce that sampled the Utah desert instantly across the touchdown web site to characterize these supplies — dust, air, water, and many others. — in case any occurred to infiltrate the seal (an occasion he referred to as “unlikely”).
Choosing up items
OSIRIS-REx launched Sept. 8, 2016, as the primary U.S. asteroid sampling mission. It carried a set of devices together with the touch-and-go pattern acquisition mechanism, or TAGSAM. The mission additionally had planetary protection implications — as a near-Earth asteroid, Bennu has a small likelihood of hitting the planet within the subsequent century.
Bennu is, because the house crow flies, about 200 million miles (321 million km) away; OSIRIS-REx arrived two years after launch. On Oct. 20, 2020, the truck-sized spacecraft sampled the younger, 60-foot-wide (18 m) crater space Nightingale. Mud and pebbles had been blown about as OSIRIS-REx touched down; the TAGSAM itself blew nitrogen fuel on the floor to usher materials into the pattern container. Contact pads on the sampling arm additionally collected tiny particles earlier than the craft backed off.
In the end, Lauretta says, the TAGSAM’s robotic arm truly went into the asteroid some 20 inches (50 centimeters), as much as its elbow joint, packing the pattern mechanism and initially jamming the closure flap with a rock simply 1.2 inches (3 cm) vast. The workforce was capable of stow the pattern within the return capsule per week later.
In spring 2021, OSIRIS-REx’s engines burned for dwelling. Earlier this month, the craft first made a remaining Earth-targeting burn, together with a later small course correction, bringing it into place to launch the capsule for re-entry.
Later, Lauretta referred to as the touchdown “pulse-pounding. Boy, did we stick that touchdown! It didn’t transfer, it didn’t roll, it didn’t bounce.” He says that in re-entry, the whole pattern might have been jostled a lot that “it might all be powder” by the point it landed — although that received’t have an effect on researchers’ potential to investigate the supplies. Extra will probably be recognized quickly however he joked that his curation workforce “wouldn’t let me shake it.”
Treasured cargo
About 1/3 mile (0.5 km) in diameter, Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid that has modified little in 4.5 billion years. Meteorites from carbonaceous asteroids are uncommon and precious, containing natural molecules, hydrocarbons and amino acids — parts essential for all times as we all know it. Some even have water.
Bennu’s samples will probably be much more pristine than these in meteorites. That’s as a result of the fabric received’t have traveled by Earth’s ambiance unprotected nor landed uncovered on the floor our of world, open to the weather for probably years earlier than discovery and retrieval.
OSIRIS-REx has now given us the biggest pattern returned from a physique past the Moon, in accordance with NASA planetary scientist Melissa Morris. The pattern will take us “again to the daybreak of the photo voltaic system,” says Lauretta, noting its materials accommodates the “seeds of life” and can assist illuminate how prebiotic chemistry ultimately obtained us to life on Earth.
Lauretta thinks Bennu is about 10 p.c water (not liquid however locked up in rock), together with 5 p.c carbon by weight. He stresses there’s a “vanishingly small chance” there’s biotic materials. However the pattern might present the state that happens between an natural molecule and life itself.
Lauretta and others are notably eager on the file of Bennu’s dad or mum physique, which fashioned only some million years after the origin of the photo voltaic system. That dad or mum physique had hydrothermal deposits like these of Earth’s deep-ocean environments, in accordance with Lauretta. Its water helped kind such substances as clay. It may additionally have fashioned long-chain natural molecules, together with amino acids, that are very important for the formation of peptides. In all of the meteorites collected on Earth, just one, Lauretta says, has “a touch” of a easy peptide.
It might be a surprising first if the pattern materials yields such a discovery. Danny Glavin, Senior Scientist for Pattern Return at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle, says he and his workforce will probably be on the lookout for simply that lengthy shot. “It’s one of many first issues to search for,” he says, including, “we’re going to go after them arduous.”
Asteroid Autumn
Now the OSIRIS-APEX for Apophis Explorer, the mission is heading to that asteroid for a 2029 rendezvous. The 1,200-foot (370 m) world will come inside 20,000 miles (32,000 km) of Earth that yr, and researchers hope to check how Apophis is likely to be perturbed by the encounter. The workforce additionally plans on utilizing the spacecraft’s thrusters to blow materials from the floor to check with onboard devices.
The golden age of asteroid analysis appears to be upon us. Two Japanese missions have beforehand retrieved asteroid samples, although not from a carbonaceous world like Bennu. The DART mission efficiently demonstrated planetary protection strategies by shifting an asteroid’s orbit. Psyche will launch later this yr on a mission to a metallic asteroid, and NEO Surveyor, scheduled to launch in 2028, will hunt from house for probably hazardous asteroids.
With the Bennu pattern return and the upcoming the Psyche launch and Lucy flyby of Dinkinesh, NASA is looking this season “Asteroid Autumn.”
For Lauretta, this autumn is each busy and filled with reduction. He cried when the principle chutes deployed, particularly because it was not clear that the drogue chutes had opened first. Quickly, he’ll get to investigate the samples, which NASA says will probably be safely protected within the occasion of a authorities shutdown.
However first: a mission celebration occasion in Tucson. “We’re going to throw down,” he says.
