NASA’s OSIRIS-REx heads back to Earth after exploring Bennu asteroid
THE NASA space probe OSIRISREx on Monday left the orbit of the skyscraper-sized asteroid Bennu with a large collection of samples to begin its long two-year journey back to Earth.
Staff celebrated at the OSIRIS-REx control room in Colorado as the space vehicle pushed away from the asteroid, whose acorn-shaped body formed in the early days of our solar system.
The spacecraft found traces of hydrogen and oxygen molecules – part of the recipe for water – embedded in the asteroid’s rocky surface, said Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx mission’s principal investigator, in 2018.
The University of Arizona’s Dante Lauretta, the principal scientist, estimates the spacecraft holds between half a pound and 1 pound (200 grams and 400 grams) of mostly bite-size chunks. Either way, it easily exceeds the target of at least 2 ounces (60 grams).
It will be the biggest cosmic haul for the United States since the Apollo moon rocks. While NASA has returned comet dust and solar wind samples, this is the first time it’s gone after pieces of an asteroid. Japan has accomplished it twice but in tiny amounts.
OSIRIS-REx traveled some 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) from Earth to reach Bennu in 2018 and spent two years flying near and around it, before collecting rubble from the surface last fall. It still has a vast distance to cover before it lands in the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023.
NASA says samples will be distributed to research laboratories worldwide, but 75% of the samples will be preserved at the Johnson Space Center in Houston for future generations to study with technologies not yet created.
The roughly $800 million, minivansized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, launched in 2016 to grab and return the first U.S. sample of pristine asteroid materials. Japan is the only other country to have accomplished such a feat. Asteroids are among the leftover debris from the solar system’s formation some 4.5 billion years ago. A sample could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists say.