Greetings from the asteroid belt! Spacecraft is coming home with precious cargo
A Nasa spacecraft, which scientists believe has collected samples from an asteroid, began its two-year journey back to Earth on Monday.
The space agency’s OSIRISREX spacecraft is attempting to complete a mission to visit Bennu, a skyscraper-sized asteroid about 320 million kilometres from Earth, survey the surface, collect samples and deliver them back to this planet.
Staff celebrated at the OSIRISREX 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. OSIRIS-REX arrived at Bennu in 2018.
The spacecraft found traces of hydrogen and oxygen molecules — part of the recipe for water and thus the potential for life — embedded in the asteroid’s rocky surface, said Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REX mission’s principal investigator, in 2018.
On its journey back to Earth, the spacecraft will eject a capsule containing the asteroid samples, which Nasa said will land in a remote area of Utah.
It said samples will be distributed to research laboratories worldwide, but 75% of them will be preserved at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston for future generations to study with technologies not yet created.
The roughly $800m (about R11.2 trillion), minivan-sized OSIRIS-REX, built by the US’S Lockheed Martin, launched in 2016 to grab and return the first US 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 about 4.5 billion’ years ago.
A sample could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists said.