1 year ago
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NASA calls it a cosmic touch-and-go."When we made contact with the surface, there was a one-second delay, and then we fired a high-pressure nitrogen gas, and the surface just exploded," said Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for the University of Arizona's OSIRIS-REx mission. In October of 2020, the Lockheed Martin-built spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx — which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — made a brief touchdown on an asteroid known as Bennu.Its job was to collect a soil sample and bring it back to Earth."Asteroid Bennu is a time capsule that's over four and a half billion years old," Lauretta explained. "The minerals and chemicals that make up this object formed before the Earth even existed as a planet."Lauretta says the secrets to the solar system and life as we know it on Earth may be locked inside an eight-ounce sample of ancient dust and pebbles.Its nearly three-year journey back to Earth is almost complete.OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to parachute down to the Utah desert this September.At the Lockheed Martin campus in Littleton on Wednesday — a full dress rehearsal."The hallmark of our success is that we rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse," Lauretta said. "So we never go into a flight-critical operation unprepared."The sample recovery team will set up a makeshift clean room on-site in the desert when OSIRIS-REx makes it back to Earth.They must be extremely careful not to contaminate the sample as they prepare it for a trip to Houston, to be analyzed at the Johnson Space Center."Yeah, when we proposed this mission to NASA, we said we would gain unprecedented knowledge about the origin to life on Earth, and I intend to do my best to deliver on that promise," Lauretta said.
NASA calls it a cosmic touch-and-go.
"When we made contact with the surface, there was a one-second delay, and then we fired a high-pressure nitrogen gas, and the surface just exploded," said Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for the University of Arizona's OSIRIS-REx mission.
In October of 2020, the Lockheed Martin-built spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx — which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — made a brief touchdown on an asteroid known as Bennu.
Its job was to collect a soil sample and bring it back to Earth.
"Asteroid Bennu is a time capsule that's over four and a half billion years old," Lauretta explained. "The minerals and chemicals that make up this object formed before the Earth even existed as a planet."
Lauretta says the secrets to the solar system and life as we know it on Earth may be locked inside an eight-ounce sample of ancient dust and pebbles.
Its nearly three-year journey back to Earth is almost complete.
OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to parachute down to the Utah desert this September.
At the Lockheed Martin campus in Littleton on Wednesday — a full dress rehearsal.
"The hallmark of our success is that we rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse," Lauretta said. "So we never go into a flight-critical operation unprepared."
The sample recovery team will set up a makeshift clean room on-site in the desert when OSIRIS-REx makes it back to Earth.
They must be extremely careful not to contaminate the sample as they prepare it for a trip to Houston, to be analyzed at the Johnson Space Center.
"Yeah, when we proposed this mission to NASA, we said we would gain unprecedented knowledge about the origin to life on Earth, and I intend to do my best to deliver on that promise," Lauretta said.
English (US)