With rubble from an asteroid tucked inside, a NASA spacecraft on Monday fired its engines and began the long journey back to Earth, leaving the ancient space rock in its rearview mirror.
The trip home for the robotic prospector — the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, or Osiris-Rex — is to take two years.
Osiris-Rex reached asteroid Bennu in 2018 and spent two years flying near and around it, before collecting rubble from the surface last fall.
Photo: AP
The University of Arizona’s Dante Lauretta, the principal scientist, estimates the spacecraft holds between 200g and 400g of mostly bite-size chunks. Either way, it easily exceeds the target of at least 60g. It would be the biggest cosmic haul for the US since the Apollo moon rocks.
While NASA has returned comet dust and solar wind samples, this is the first time it has gone after pieces of an asteroid. Japan has accomplished it twice, but in tiny amounts.
Scientists described Monday’s departure from Bennu’s neighborhood as bittersweet.
“I’ve been working on getting a sample back from an asteroid since my daughter was in diapers and now she’s graduating from high school, so it’s been a long journey,” NASA project scientist Jason Dworkin said.
“We have gotten used to being at Bennu and seeing new and exciting images and data coming back to us here on Earth,” Lauretta added.
Osiris-Rex was already nearly 300km from the solar-orbiting Bennu when it fired its main engines on Monday afternoon for a fast, clean get-away.
Colorado-based flight controllers for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin applauded when confirmation arrived of the spacecraft’s departure: “We’re bringing the samples home.”
Scientists hope to uncover some of the solar system’s secrets from the samples vacuumed in October last year from Bennu’s dark, rough, carbon-rich surface. The asteroid is an estimated 490m wide and 4.5 billion years old.
Bennu — considered a broken chunk from a bigger asteroid — is believed to hold the preserved building blocks of the solar system. The returning pieces could shed light on how the planets formed and how life arose on Earth. They also could improve Earth’s odds against any incoming rocks.
Although the asteroid is 287 million kilometers away, Osiris-Rex will put another 2.3 billion kilometers on its odometer to catch up with Earth.
The SUV-size spacecraft would circle the sun twice before delivering its small sample capsule to Utah’s desert floor on Sept. 24, 2023, to end the more than US$800 million mission. It launched from Cape Canaveral in 2016.
The precious samples are to be housed at a new lab under construction at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, already home to hundreds of kilograms of lunar material collected by the 12 Apollo moonwalkers from 1969 to 1972.
Scientists initially thought the spacecraft stored 1kg of asteroid rubble, but more recently revised their estimate downward. They would not know for certain how much is on board until the capsule is opened after touchdown.
“Every bit of sample is valuable,” Dworkin said. “We have to be patient.”
NASA has lots more asteroid projects planned.
Set to launch in October, a spacecraft named Lucy is to fly past swarms of asteroids out near Jupiter, while a spacecraft known as Dart is to blast off in November in an attempt to redirect an asteroid as part of a planetary protection test.
Then next year, the Psyche spacecraft is to take off for an odd, metallic asteroid bearing the same name. However, none of these missions involve sample return.
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