The University of Arizona’s latest space venture will take seven years from launch to return — a blink of an eye compared to the odyssey of its target.
OSIRIS-REx, the NASA New Frontiers mission being led by the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Lab, will launch in 2016, catch up with an asteroid named Bennu in 2018, and return a sample of it to Earth in 2023.
Bennu’s life story and why scientists are so interested in its makeup are the subject of a six-minute animation released Tuesday by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, let the movie speak for him last week when he presented a mission update to the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Tucson last week.
The movie depicts the formation of our solar system and highlights the importance of asteroids as 4.5-billion-year-old repositories of the star stuff from which all matter came.
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Lauretta was followed at the Tucson conference by other researchers who are painstakingly collecting information so that the mission is not too surprised by what it encounters when it catches up to the streaking asteroid in October 2018.
Geologist Derek Richardson of the University of Maryland, for example, is conducting laboratory studies of a variety of “regolith,” or loose rock, that may lie on the surface of Bennu.
Richardson’s “numerical simulations of granular processes” are designed to answer the question, “Will the device penetrate the surface?”
OSIRIS-REx has a telescoping arm, called a TAGSAM that will “kiss” the surface of the asteroid, blast it with nitrogen, and gather up rock samples of at least 600 grams and up to 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds).
“We don’t know what the material will be like on Bennu, so we’re building up a whole library of materials,” Richardson said.
The movie, along with a poster and stills from it, are available for download at the NASA Goddard website.
