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NASA’s $1 billion OSIRIS-REx sample return mission is less than 48 hours away from making a dramatic landing in the Utah desert. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft (which stands for „Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer”) is currently on its way to Earth carrying a precious cargo: a capsule 8.8 oz (250 g) of material Collected from the asteroid Bennu in 2020.
After being launched by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft about 63,000 miles (101,000 km) above Earth, the capsule is scheduled to touch down at the Department of Defense’s remote Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) at 8 a.m. Sunday (Sept. 24). :55 am MDT (10:55 am EDT, 1455 GMT). You can watch the landing here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA.
OSIRIS-REx mission managers held a briefing Friday (Sept. 22) to talk about final preparations for the capsule’s return and discuss the spacecraft’s current health. „Everyone is really feeling a buzz because we’re less than two days away from having the Bennu samples on the ground,” Lockheed Martin OSIRIS-REx project manager Sandra Freund said during the briefing. „We’re very confident that everything will go as planned on Sunday morning.” Our navigation and spacecraft performance are exceptional and we are on time to land on the Utah test and training range.”
Related: How NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Will Bring Asteroid Samples to Earth in 5 Easy Steps
read more: OSIRIS-REx’s asteroid sample will arrive at Earth on September 24. Here’s how to watch it live.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made its final maneuver on September 17, heading a precise path toward our planet, and as Freund said, the mission appears to be on track so far. „There is no need for additional maneuvering opportunities. The spacecraft’s trajectory and performance are just there.”
However, the spacecraft still needs to adjust its orientation so it is pointed where it needs to launch the asteroid sampling capsule to hit its target. Mission planners will hold an additional meeting early Sunday morning (Sept. 24) to vote on a „go” or „no-go” capsule release.
But OSIRIS-REx team leaders are confident things will go according to plan, based on how the mission has gone so far. „OSIRIS-REx is so successful because we pay attention to detail and think through all possible contingencies,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission. „For example, if a sample capsule is briefly opened, we want to ensure that any sample material that made it to the Utah desert floor can be quickly identified and recovered so that meaningful science can still be extracted from it.”
During the briefing, mission leaders pointed to another example, the problem that arose in October 2020 when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s sample collector opened and lost some material in space. This prevented the team from fully measuring the mass of the collected asteroid material. But teams at Lockheed Martin, the space contractor that built the spacecraft, were able to find a solution and OSIRIS-REx scientists ultimately estimated the mass to be about 250 grams (8.8 ounces), plus or minus 101 grams (3.6 ounces).
“That’s good news because the job requirements I promised Lori [Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Sciences Division at NASA] And the headquarters team said we will bring back 60 grams [2.1 ounces]. So even at the low end of that estimate, we’re exceeding our mission requirement,” Lauretta said.
If the capsule makes it safely to the desert site, it will be met first by US Air Force personnel, who will secure the landing site and ensure its safety for the next phase, which may include rescue teams. From there, the capsule will be picked up by a Department of Defense helicopter and immediately transported to a temporary clean room set up at Dugway Proving Ground, a US military installation. was commissioned Testing of chemical and biological safety equipment.
Once safely inside the cleanroom at Dugway, the capsule will be opened and the vial containing the samples from the asteroid Bennu will be ready for transport again. They will then be flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, where a newly built facility will house them, the agency’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Sciences (ARES) division.
The capsule hardware will be managed at JSC and may be made available for „space-exposed hardware studies or other types of scientific or public applications,” Glaze said during the briefing.
If all goes as planned, the OSIRIS-REx team will spend two years analyzing the objects returned from Bennu. That analysis could help scientists better understand the role of carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu, or get a better idea of what our solar system was like in its early days. More than 200 researchers at 35 different facilities will be given access to 25% of the material recovered from Bennu to aid in the study of asteroid material.
Meanwhile, 70% of the material will remain at the Johnson Space Center, where it will be studied by NASA officials „by unborn scientists using technologies not yet discovered to answer fundamental questions about the solar system.” OSIRIS-REx Press Kit In the states.
The remaining 5% will be split between the Canadian Space Agency, who will receive 4% of the sample in exchange for building the laser altimeter that will fly on the OSIRIS-REx probe, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), who will receive 0.5%.
The mission collected NASA’s first asteroid sample, but the third worldwide. Japan has previously launched two missions to accomplish such a mission: Hayabusa 1 collected dust and sand from the asteroid Itokawa and returned samples in 2010; and Hayabusa 2, which landed on asteroid Ryugu in 2019 and returned its samples in 2020.
While it’s unknown whether OSIRIS-REx will stick to its landing, Lauretta hopes that whatever happens on Sunday, the mission will reward her team with valuable science data.
„This has been a hallmark of OSIRIS-REx from the very beginning of concept development through design, building test launch operations, and now model curation and model analysis,” said Lauretta. „We’ve always taken a deliberate, careful, cautious approach. I think that’s why this mission has been so successful to date. We’re not letting our enthusiasm down.”
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