- How much do you think we can learn about the origins of life and the solar system from the samples brought back from Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission?
As the sample container has safely lander and over half a pound of material is being taken to secure clean room for storage, a great deal is likely to be learned. Some is to be distributed to scientists now, but a significant proportion is going to be stored and released to future scientists as new investigative technologies develop.
- After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, [24th September 2023] in a targeted area of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City.
- Within an hour and a half, the capsule was transported by helicopter to a temporary clean room set up in a hangar on the training range, where it now is connected to a continuous flow of nitrogen.
- Getting the sample under a “nitrogen purge,” as scientists call it, was one of the OSIRIS-REx team’s most critical tasks today. Nitrogen is a gas that doesn’t interact with most other chemicals, and a continuous flow of it into the sample container inside the capsule will keep out earthly contaminants to leave the sample pure for scientific analyses.
- The returned samples collected from Bennu will help scientists worldwide make discoveries to better understand planet formation and the origin of organics and water that led to life on Earth, as well as benefit all of humanity by learning more about potentially hazardous asteroids.
- The pristine material from Bennu – rocks and dust collected from the asteroid’s surface in 2020 – will offer generations of scientists a window into the time when the Sun and planets were forming about 4.5 billion years ago.
It is noteworthy, that new science experiments continue to be conducted on the Apollo samples of Moon rocks, so similarly these investigations will continue long into the future!
This successful return mission will add to the knowledge which is being gained from the Japanese Hayabusa-2 asteroid sample return mission from the Ryugu asteroid.
- The mission is now progressing. An explosive charge has been detonated to excavate a crater ad expose some samples of (hopefully) pristine material to return to Earth for analysis.
- The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has sent back images of the crater made when it detonated an explosive charge next to the asteroid it is investigating. On 5 April, the Japanese probe released a 14kg device packed with plastic explosive towards the asteroid Ryugu. The blast drove a copper projectile into the surface, hoping to create a 10m-wide depression. Scientists want to get a “fresh” sample of rock to help them better understand how Earth and the other planets formed.
- It is the second touchdown for the robotic Hayabusa-2 craft, which grabbed rocks from the asteroid in February.
- Japan’s enterprising asteroid-sampling spacecraft began they journey home Tuesday (Nov. 12 2019), packed full of precious space rocks that scientists can’t wait to get their hands on.
- After more than a year packed full of work at the rocky body, mission scientists will now spend a year waiting for the spacecraft’s return to Earth.
- 5th December 2020 The sample capsule has now entered the atmosphere and parachuted to Earth.
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- The Bennu OSIRIS-REx mission? will also add information to the DART asteroid deflection mission, by showing the composition and structure of this type of asteroid which will be invaluable if we need to deflect one without breaking it up causing multiple impacts on Earth!
- NASA and its partners are studying several different approaches to deflecting a hazardous asteroid.
- The most advanced of these techniques is called a kinetic impactor, and a mission to demonstrate this technology is called the Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), is slated to launch in 2021.
- Of course, we aren’t going to meddle with the orbit of an asteroid that could pose a risk to Earth for a test.
- The target for DART is Didymos B, the moon of a larger asteroid, called Didymos A.
The DART experiment successfully caused a deflection and allowed for the to be monitored and measured!
These various missions provide us with a progressively better understanding of the joined up processes and mechanisms of the Solar System, its planets, moons, and asteroids!