UA spacecraft snaps brilliant new photo
TUCSON — It’s a striking image of Earth, captured by a spacecraft operated by the University of Arizona.
The image, taken from about 100,000 miles away, shows swirling clouds above the Pacific Ocean. Australia is visible in the bottom-left corner of the planet. California can be seen in the upper right, Japan on the upper left.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured images as it flew past Earth on Friday as part of a maneuver designed to push the
craft into the orbit of a distant asteroid.
The same camera, along with others, will be used to take images when the spacecraft reaches a distant asteroid named Bennu next year.
In fact, the main purpose for taking images of the Earth was to test the cameras.
“This is a great preview of what we’ll get when we get to the asteroid,” said UA professor Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, as the image was unveiled Tuesday during a news conference in Tucson. The $1 billion mission is being led by the university.
Lauretta said the pictures of Earth started coming into mission’s Science Processing and Operations Center about 6:15 p.m. Friday in Tucson.
The first person to see the planet let out a shriek. Lauretta said he and the others rushed to her laptop computer. They wanted to see it on a bigger screen.
“Get it up on the screen, get it up on the screen,” someone yelled.
“We were shaking,” Lauretta recalled. “We couldn’t even plug a video cable into the computer.”
The final results were worth all the planning and hard work, said Bashar Rizk, instrument scientist for the cameras.
“It was beautiful,” he said.
And there are more to come.
The UA plans to release images that OSIRIS-REx took of the moon later this week.
The SUV-size spacecraft launched Sept. 8, 2016, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and is scheduled to arrive near the asteroid Bennu in 2018.
The mission’s goal is to collect and return a sample from an asteroid that potentially could be hazardous to Earth by the late 22nd century. The spacecraft’s robotic arm can collect up to a few pounds of surface material.
If successful, OSIRIS-REx will be the first U.S. mission to bring an asteroid sample back to Earth.
The spacecraft itself will not return to Earth.
A few hours before reaching the Earth’s atmosphere, the craft will jettison a capsule containing the sample and put it on a trajectory to the planet. The craft will maneuver itself into an orbit around the sun.
The capsule will hit the Earth’s atmosphere at about 27,000 mph, free falling until its parachute deploys. The main parachute will release about 2 miles above the earth, setting the capsule up to land in the Utah desert, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City.
Engineers and scientists will be waiting there on Sept. 24, 2023.
They’ll collect the capsule and transport the priceless material to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they’ll remove the dirt and disperse the materials for study.
The mission — from launch to landing — spans about seven years.
But the research is expected to continue for decades.