Spacecraft drops cargo to Earth after plucking material from asteroid | 24CA News

An area capsule that grabbed uncommon fragments from the asteroid Bennu got here to a “stable rest” within the Utah desert on Sunday, touching down after a mission that started seven years in the past, NASA mentioned.

The capsule easily descended with a parachute to its touchdown zone about 4 hours after the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft travelled previous Earth and launched the cargo. 

Scientists estimate the capsule holds not less than a cup of rubble, or about 250 grams, from the carbon-rich asteroid, Bennu, however will not know for certain till the container is opened. Some spilled and floated away when the spacecraft scooped up an excessive amount of and rocks jammed the container’s lid throughout assortment three years in the past.

OSIRIS-REx had travelled to a crater within the asteroid’s northern hemisphere in 2016 and reached it two years later. Once there, it lowered a robotic arm vacuum into the floor to extract the third and largest pattern ever taken from an asteroid within the first mission of its variety for NASA. 

Canada had an necessary function to play, offering an instrument known as the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter (OLA), which scanned and measured the floor of the 500-metre-wide asteroid, making a 3D mannequin that helped mission planners determine the place to land.

Science adviser to the president of the Canadian Space Agency John Moores mentioned the contribution means scientists in Canada may have entry to a small portion of the asteroid materials.

“In total, we laid down more than three billion measurements … so this now provides a very highly precise map of the asteroid,” mentioned Cameron Dickinson, a employees engineer at Canadian house firm MDA Ltd., which designed the Canadian part of the spacecraft.

Japan will even get a number of the bounty, after returning to Earth with a lot smaller samples — a couple of teaspoon of rubble — from two different asteroids in 2010 and 2020, giving NASA a portion every time.

2-year evaluation

The capsule that sucked up unfastened rocks and pebbles for NASA landed after a journey residence of almost two billion kilometres.

NASA deployed a crew, outfitted with helicopters, to recuperate the capsule from the desert and can transport it to a short lived clear room arrange on the U.S. Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range.

It’s estimated the restoration crew will want a day to take the capsule aside and put together the pattern for transport to a brand new lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, the place a two-year evaluation will happen. The pattern will probably be revealed to the general public on Oct. 11.

The mission’s lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, will accompany the pattern to Texas. The opening of the container in Houston within the subsequent day or two will probably be “the real moment of truth,” given the uncertainty over the quantity inside, he mentioned forward of the touchdown.

Bennu, found in 1999, is classed as a “near-Earth object” as a result of it passes comparatively near our planet each six years. It measures about half a kilometre throughout and is roughly the scale of the Empire State constructing.

The asteroid is predicted to return dangerously near Earth in 2182 — probably shut sufficient to hit. The information gleaned by OSIRIS-REx will assist with any asteroid-deflection effort, in line with Lauretta.

Tim Haltigin, planetary senior mission scientist with the Canadian Space Agency, has labored on the venture for a decade. Asteroids, he mentioned, are leftover elements from the formation of the photo voltaic system, and getting a pattern from one “is sort of like going back into a cosmic mixing bowl and pulling out individual grains of sugar and a bit of flour and, you know, maybe a chocolate chip.”

“And so this is how we’re able to study the raw ingredients of the solar system as they were billions and billions and billions of years ago,” Haltigin mentioned.

Now freed from the pattern capsule, OSIRIS-REx is already focusing on the asteroid Apophis for an encounter scheduled for 2029, when the house rock will make its closest identified flyby of Earth.