A lot of the spacecraft we ship out into the Photo voltaic System are by no means meant to return. Time, house, and entropy overtake them, or else they’re purposely despatched crashing to their doom on the finish of their missions. However not OSIRIS-REx. Its mission was solely a hit when it returned to Earth with its uncommon cargo.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx collected its pattern of asteroid Bennu in October 2020. Since that point, we’ve been eagerly awaiting the fabric’s supply to Earth, the place it may be scrutinized rigorously in laboratories in numerous nations.
On September twenty fourth, after a two-year journey from Bennu to Earth, the long-anticipated day arrived, and the spacecraft launched its sample-return capsule. NASA used the spacecraft’s cameras to file the discharge.
The Sun is at the top of the image, and at the left of the image, a crescent Earth is visible. The image is processed to remove scattered sunlight and prevent the Earth from saturating the image. As a result, we can see the capsule and the rare cargo it holds as it heads down to Earth.
The capsule was released from Bennu at 4:42 AM at a distance of over 100,000 km (63,000 miles) from Earth. When it entered the atmosphere, the sample capsule was screaming along at 44,500 km/h (27,650 mph.) The capsule is designed to withstand all the heat from the friction, but not an impact. The capsule deployed its drogue parachute at 8:44 AM, and by the time it landed, its speed was reduced to 18 km/h (11 mph.)
This animation shows how the maneuver played out.
The whole operation wasn’t without drama, though.
The sample return capsule uses two parachutes. At first, the capsule was travelling so fast that deploying a standard type of parachute would be ineffective. It would simply be torn to shreds or ripped away from the spacecraft.
To avoid this, the capsule first deploys a drogue chute. Drogue chutes are designed to be deployed from high-speed objects because they’re smaller. They lower an object’s velocity but not enough to land. The sample return’s drogue chute scratched enough of the capsule’s speed that it was safe to deploy its landing chute without it being torn apart. But the mission team didn’t receive confirmation that the drogue chute had deployed. And without it, it would’ve been game over.
Dante Lauretta is OSIRIS-REx’s principal investigator. In a press briefing after the capsule landed, he explained the intense anxiety leading up to the capsule’s safe landing as he rode in a helicopter toward the landing site. “I was just trying to make sure I didn’t totally break down in front of an international audience, right? It’s like, okay, you got to keep it together,” Lauretta said.
When they finally heard that the main chute deployed properly, the floodgates opened. “I knew the moment the chute opened that was it. We knew what to do,” Lauretta continued. “There were no surprises left. And it was overwhelming relief, gratitude, pride, awe, and really trying to convince myself that I wasn’t dreaming; that it was actually happening; that the chute was open; that the capsule was coming down; and we got that science treasure in hand.”
The entire process, down to the landing, was flawless.
“Boy, did we stick that landing,” Lauretta said, “and that is pretty much what OSIRIS-REx has done consistently.”
Now comes the science.
Asteroid Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid, the most common type. About 75% of asteroids are C-types like Bennu. They’re relics from the Solar System’s earliest days, and they hold clues to how the Solar System, including the Earth, formed. Bennu was chosen from a list of over 500,000 candidate asteroids. C-type asteroids typically contain lots of volatile ices, and scientists hope the sample from Bennu will have volatiles, organic compounds, and even pristine carbon from the primitive Solar System.
The samples are making their way to two places. One is NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate at the Johnson Space Center. But Japan has their own expertise in handling returned samples, and a few of OSIRIS-REx’s treasure will head to Japan’s Extraterrestrial Pattern Curation Heart. From there it’ll be distributed to totally different researchers.
Jason Dworkin is an astrobiologist and an OSIRIS-REx mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart. “When the pattern returns, 233 scientists globally, together with me, will get to discover the asteroid in our labs,” Dworkin said previous to the mission’s profitable completion. “In doing so, we’ll deal with dozens of questions on asteroids, the early photo voltaic system, and the origins of life.”
Three quarters of the pattern will probably be saved at NASA’s Johnson Spaceflight Heart for future use. That is how the Apollo samples have been curated, and it’s confirmed efficient. As scientific strategies and analytical instruments advance, they are often utilized to pristine samples.
There are 4 broad questions that Dworkin and different scientists are eager to search out solutions to:
- Does the pattern include natural compounds that might have influenced the origins of life?
- How does the Bennu pattern examine with our interpretation of knowledge collected on the asteroid?
- What does the pattern inform us in regards to the historical past of the photo voltaic system?
- How has the pattern modified because the spacecraft collected it?
Years of research will generate solutions to those questions.
However for now, the group behind OSIRIS-REx is having fun with the nice and cozy glow of a profitable mission.
“The entire group had butterflies as we speak, however that’s the targeted anticipation of a vital occasion by a well-prepared group,” stated Wealthy Burns, mission supervisor for OSIRIS-REx at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart. “For us, this was the World Sequence, ninth inning, bases-loaded second, and this group knocked it out of the park,” he stated after the capsule landed efficiently.
With the Bennu pattern safely within the fingers of scientists, OSIRIS-REx’s mission is over. However the spacecraft remains to be going. It’s being despatched to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis, and has been renamed OSIRIS-APEX (Apophis Explorer.) It’ll rendezvous with Apophis in April 2029 and can orbit the asteroid for about 18 months, gathering observations.
It received’t take any samples, although it is going to use its sampling arm to disturb the asteroid’s floor and check out what’s beneath.
