On September 24, 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned a valuable pattern of rocky materials from asteroid Bennu to Earth. The capsule landed safely underneath its major parachute, but it surely arrived greater than a minute early. The trigger: a small drogue parachute, designed to gradual the spacecraft down previous to the primary chute’s deployment, didn’t open. After an investigation into the mishap, NASA believes they’ve decided the reason for the (fortunately non-catastrophic) failure.
If all had gone as deliberate, the drogue chute ought to have deployed at 100,000 ft, stabilizing the capsule for about 5 minutes of the descent. At 9,000 ft, the drogue could be reduce free, and the primary chute would take over.
As an alternative, the drogue, nonetheless packed inside the capsule, was reduce free early (at 100,000 ft). When the capsule reached 9,000 ft, the drogue was lastly deployed, however having been reduce already, it merely drifted away, and the primary parachute took over.
Based on a NASA press release, “inconsistent wiring label definitions within the design plans seemingly brought on engineers to wire the parachutes’ launch triggers such that indicators meant to deploy the drogue chute fired out of order.”
In different phrases, the sign meant to deploy the drogue reduce the road, whereas the sign to chop the road as an alternative deployed the drogue.
Investigators consider this malfunction was because of imprecise labeling throughout the spacecraft’s design and building. Within the capsule design paperwork, the phrase ‘major’ was used on the sign aspect of the equipment to imply the primary parachute, whereas on the receiver aspect, ‘major’ referred to a pyrotechnic that fired to deploy the drogue. When the 2 mains have been related, due to this fact, the actions of the drogue have been set to happen out of order.
For now, the investigation’s conclusion is tentative, pending a take a look at of the capsule {hardware}. At the moment, the capsule is in isolation at NASA’s Johnson Area Heart, the place the pattern materials is being processed and extracted. The cautious elimination and examination of the collected asteroid regolith is the highest precedence for the mission scientists, and testing the capsule {hardware} should wait till it may be safely faraway from containment.
So far, the group has collected 70.3 grams of fabric (effectively above the mission’s said aim of 60 grams), and there may be nonetheless extra materials inside the sampler head but to be eliminated.
“The OSIRIS-REx pattern is the most important carbon-rich asteroid pattern ever delivered to Earth and can assist scientists examine the origins of life on our personal planet for generations to come back,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on October 11.
Preliminary evaluation, based on OSIRIS-REx Precept Investigator Dante Lauretta, reveals that the pattern incorporates water-bearing clay and carbon-rich materials.
Evaluating the Bennu pattern with that retrieved from asteroid Ryugu by JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 mission in December 2020 will give researchers a greater understanding of the geologic variety of near-Earth objects. Like time capsules, samples from these asteroids might help scientists perceive the story of Earth’s formation within the early photo voltaic system.
OSIRIS-REx was not the primary NASA pattern return mission to endure a drogue parachute malfunction. In 2004, the Genesis mission, designed to return a pattern of photo voltaic wind particles from area, didn’t deploy its drogue chute over the Utah desert. In that occasion, the failure resulted within the spacecraft crashing, contaminating lots of the samples inside – although sufficient have been preserved to attain the mission’s science aims. An investigation into the Genesis incident decided {that a} deceleration sensor didn’t set off the parachute.
Press Launch: NASA Finds Likely Cause of OSIRIS-REx Parachute Deployment Sequence.
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