A seven-year investigation into the allegedly most hazardous rock in the solar system is about to come to a spectacular end. The “soil” samples that the Osiris-Rex mission collected from the surface of the asteroid Bennu are being returned to Earth. The NASA spacecraft will scatter these abrasive compounds as it passes Earth on Sunday. In order to shield them from a fiery plummet to the US State of Utah, they will be placed inside a capsule.
The chemistry of the materials is anticipated to shed new light on how the planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and perhaps even shed light on how life began on Earth.
Astroid Bennu is “a journey back to our origins,” according to Osiris-Rex.
At 8:55 local time (14:55 GMT; 15:55 BST), the aircraft is anticipated to touch down on Department of Defence desert land. Everyone participating in the Osiris-Rex project is going to have a stressful day, especially during the 13 minutes it takes the capsule to plummet through the atmosphere.
The car-sized container will begin travelling at a speed of more than 12 km/h (27,000 mph) and reach a peak temperature of more than 3,000 °C. However, a thermal shield along with parachutes should enable it to land safely on the arid plain. According to mission principle investigator Dante Lauretta, “We have spent an excessive amount of time preparing for contingencies, everything that could go wrong, and all the horrible things that we might encounter.” But the good news is that we’ve prepared because we’ve practised endlessly.
Bennu, which has a very slim possibility of colliding with Earth in the late 21st century, is the subject of the Osiris-Rex spacecraft, which departed from Earth in 2016.The 500m-wide boulder took the probe two years to reach, and it spent another two years watching the “space mountain” before attempting the risky series of movements that yielded the stockpile of surface elements.
All that is left to do is get the samples, which weigh roughly 250g (9oz), safely to the ground. NASA announced the spacecraft had released the capsule just before 05:00 MDT (11:00 GMT; 12:00 BST) and that the probe had also performed a diversion manoeuvre to ensure it could pass our planet. Although the recovery crews are optimistic, they are aware that nothing should be taken for granted. Genesis, a spacecraft that was returning solar wind samples in 2004, is the ghost that looms over this occasion. It crashed to the earth at a speed of more than 300 km/h (190 mph) after its parachute failed to deploy, shattering its contents.
Richard Witherspoon of capsule maker Lockheed Martin said, “We comprehend the problem that occurred on Genesis, which was some gravity controls were set upside down. We have no concerns about the capsule arriving and functioning as intended because the gravity switches on it have undergone numerous thorough tests to ensure they are put correctly.
However, there will be a “breach team” on hand just in case.
In the most recent days, meteorologists at the Utah Test and Training Range have been launching weather balloons to gather the most up-to-date data to aid in predicting the final drop position. The capsule will hang from its primary chute for five minutes, but because there aren’t expected to be strong winds, it won’t likely veer too far off course. The fact that the desert has received so much rain this year is the bigger problem. Standing puddles and a lot of muck are present. “That makes recovery with vehicles, ground vehicles, difficult,” said Dan Ruth, chief meteorologist at the US Army’s Dugway camp. They might become stuck. On the plus side, though, it will help the machinery by reducing dust.
The recovery teams intend to take helicopters to the drop site, place the capsule in a net, and fly it to a makeshift cleanroom at Dugway. The inner canister of the capsule housing the Bennu samples will be taken out and sealed in nitrogen in this sterile chamber before being transported to the Johnson Space Centre in Texas for in-depth analysis. The entire recovery process has been planned to prevent contaminating the samples with anything from the Earth that could jeopardise the upcoming research.
Deputy curator for the Osiris-Rex mission Christopher Sneed described Bennu as a “carbonaceous asteroid. “We believe that these kinds of bodies date back to the formation of the Solar System and serve as the precursors of the planets. There are substances and inclusions that helped create the planets, the elements that make up our planet, and possibly even the molecules that led to the emergence of life on Earth.
The NASA probe will be given instructions to move on to another asteroid named Apophis after releasing the capsule. The meeting is scheduled for 2029.