Asteroid sample taken
WASHINGTON: A Nasa spacecraft touched down on the rugged surface of the Bennu asteroid yesterday, grabbing rocks dating back to the birth of our solar system to bring home.
The minivansized Osirisrex spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, extended its 3.35m robotic arm towards a flat patch of gravel near Bennu’s north pole and plucked the sample, the space agency’s first handful of pristine asteroid rocks.
‘‘Sample collection is complete, and the backaway burn has executed,’’ Lockheed mission operator Estelle Church added seconds later, confirming the spacecraft eased away from the space rock after making contact.
The probe will send back images of the sample collection throughout the week so scientists can examine how much material was retrieved and determine whether the probe will need to make another collection attempt.
If a successful collection is confirmed, the spacecraft will journey back towards Earth, arriving in 2023. Japan is the only other country to have already accomplished this.
Bennu, more than 321 million kilometres from Earth and whose acornshaped body formed in the early days of our solar system, could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists say.
The robotic arm’s collection device, shaped like an oversized shower head, is designed to release a pressurised gas to kick up debris.
The spacecraft launched in 2016 from Kennedy Space Centre for the journey to
Bennu. It has been in orbit around the asteroid for nearly two years preparing for the ‘‘touch and go’’ manoeuvre.
‘‘A lot of things could go wrong because the spacecraft’s about the size of a van, and the asteroid has a lot of boulders in it,’’ Nasa a planetary scientist Lucy Lim said in an earlier interview.
‘‘So we have to go between the boulders to get our sample, and a lot of planning went into that.’’
Asteroids are among the leftover debris from the solar system’s formation some
4.5 billion years ago.
Scientists believe asteroids and comets crashing into early Earth may have delivered organic compounds and water that seeded the planet for life.
Atomiclevel analysis of samples from Bennu could provide key evidence to support that hypothesis. — Reuters