Nasa celebrates record as spacecraft enters orbit around Bennu
BREAKING a space exploration record on New Year’s Eve, Nasa’s first asteroid-sampling mission spacecraft entered into orbit around the asteroid Bennu, making it the smallest object ever to be orbited by a spacecraft.
Inching around the asteroid at a snail’s pace, the first orbit of The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) marks a leap for humankind.
Never before has a spacecraft from Earth circled so close to such a small space object – one with barely enough gravity to keep a vehicle in a stable orbit.
The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) arrived at the asteroid Bennu on December 3.
The spacecraft, 110 million kilometres away, carried out a single, eight-second burn of its thrusters on Monday.
“The team continued our long string of successes by executing the orbit-insertion manoeuvre perfectly,” said Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson, in the US.
“With the navigation campaign coming to an end, we are looking forward to the scientific mapping and sample site selection phase of the mission,” Lauretta said.
“Entering orbit around Bennu is an amazing accomplishment that our team has been planning for years,” he said.
Now, the spacecraft will circle Bennu about a 1.75km from its centre, closer than any other spacecraft has come to its celestial object of study.
Previously the closest orbit of a planetary body was in May 2016, when the Rosetta spacecraft orbited about 7km from the centre of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to orbit Bennu at a leisurely 62 hours per orbit.
The manoeuvre on New Year’s Eve to place the spacecraft into orbit about Bennu is the first of many exciting navigation activities planned for the mission.
The OSIRIS-REx team will resume science operations next month. At that point, the spacecraft will perform a series of close fly-bys of Bennu for several months to take high-resolution images of the asteroid to help select a sampling site. The spacecraft will briefly touch the surface of Bennu next year to retrieve a sample.
The mission is scheduled to deliver the sample to Earth in September 2023.
Entering orbit around Bennu is an amazing accomplishment that our team has been planning
Dante Lauretta
Principal investigator, University of Arizona