Imagine parallel parking a 15-passenger van into just two to 3 parking spaces surrounded by two-story boulders. On October 20, a University of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years within the making will attempt the astronomical equivalent of quite 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) away.
A NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx will soon try to touch the surface of an asteroid and collect loose rubble.
OSIRIS-REx is that the United States' first asteroid sample return mission, progressing to collect and carry a pristine, unaltered sample from an asteroid back to Earth for scientific study. The spacecraft will try to touch the surface of the asteroid Bennu, which is hurtling through space at 63,000 miles per hour (101,000 kilometers per hour).
If all goes in step with a plan, the spacecraft will deploy an 11-foot-long (3-metre-long) robotic arm called TAGSAM – Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism – and spend about 10 seconds collecting a minimum of two ounces (50 grams) of loose rubble from the asteroid. The spacecraft monitored remotely by a team of scientists and engineers, will then hide out the sample and start its return to Earth, scheduled for 2023.
You can watch this sample collection "Touch-And-Go" maneuver October 20 at 5:00 pm EDT/ 2:00 pm PDT (2100 UTC) above, or on NASA Television and therefore the agency's website.
As senior VP for research and innovation at Arizona and an applied scientist with a protracted career in space systems engineering, I think this milestone for OSIRIS-REx captures perfectly the spirit of research and innovation, the careful balance of problem-solving and perseverance, of obstacle and opportunity.
OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's sampling arm. (NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)
What Bennu can teach us
In 2004, Michael Drake then heads of the Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory; his protégé, Dante Lauretta, then an Arizona professor of planetary science; and experts from Lockheed Martin and NASA discussed the very earliest concept of the OSIRIS-REx mission and what it would achieve.
Asteroids are relics of the earliest materials that formed our scheme, and studying such a sample might allow scientists to answer fundamental questions about the origins of the system. Further, Bennu could be a near-Earth asteroid with a possible risk of impacting the world within the late 2100s, therefore the mission is also exploring ways during which such a collision could be avoided.
Perhaps, though, the foremost ambitious goal of the OSIRIS-REx mission is resource identification – the "RI" in OSIRIS. This means, essentially, mapping the chemical properties of Bennu to find out, among other things, about the potential for mining asteroids to supply propellant – a notion which, in 2004, was far prior to its time.
NASA selected Arizona to guide the mission in 2011, with Drake at the helm. Lauretta, a first-generation collegian, and Arizona alumnus took over when Drake died that year and continues to guide OSIRIS-REx today. He would unquestionably make his predecessor proud.
While OSIRIS-REx is that the first NASA mission to aim to gather a sample from an asteroid, the scientific and technological knowledge required of such a mission is that the results of decades of prior exploration. within the early 1990s, NASA's Galileo flew past the asteroids Gaspra and Ida. NEAR Shoemaker was the primary human-made object to orbit and land on an asteroid. Before heading for the dwarf planet Ceres in 2012, NASA's Dawn spacecraft orbited and mapped extensively the asteroid Vesta.
And perhaps most importantly, in 2010, the Japanese counterpart of NASA, JAXA, returned to Earth a little amount of dust from an asteroid via its Hayabusa spacecraft.
Early last year, JAXA's Hayabusa 2 landed on and successfully collected a sample from the asteroid Ryugu. The spacecraft will return to Earth in December of this year. it's been a privilege and an absolute delight to look at and learn from the accomplishments of our colleagues in Japan.
Navigating the unexpected
OSIRIS-REx launched from foreland, Florida, on 8 September 2016, and got wind of Bennu in December 2018. within the months leading up to the current moment, its team of scientists and engineers has remotely conducted two rehearsals, getting very as regards to Bennu without touching it.
When the OSIRIS-REx team selected Bennu as its target, it suspected and hoped that the asteroid's surface would look something sort of a sandy beach. But the scientific process – and nature itself – is stuffed with surprises, some challenging, all wondrous.
As the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft approached Bennu, its suite of high-resolution cameras beamed many photos of the asteroid back to Earth, revealing not a beachlike surface, but a rugged, boulder-strewn landscape.
This wasn't exactly within the plan.
The team pored over these images for months, looking for a site both wide enough for a spacecraft the scale of an oversized van to the touchdown and maneuver without hitting a boulder and containing material fine enough to produce loose rubble to gather.
On 12 December 2019, the OSIRIS-REx team announced the chosen landing site: Nightingale. Nightingale is home to a comparatively new crater the scale of a court. At its edge lies a boulder the scale of a two-story building.
The team, which incorporates many faculty, researchers, and students from Arizona and several other partner institutions, affectionately refers to the present boulder as "Mount Doom".
In one small section of Nightingale's crater – the dimensions of just some parking spaces – the team identified loose rubble sufficiently little for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to grab and bear away.
Bennu's 152-meter boulder jutting from its southern hemisphere. (NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
Things could go wrong on October 20.
Aside from crashing into Mount Doom, other less dramatic, more probable risks lurk. The TAGSAM collector head could land on a rock, perched at an angle, instead of flush against a flat surface of rubble, making its collection far less effective.
Because the collector head can accommodate particles only the scale of a nickel or smaller, there's also the danger of it being effectively "clogged" by something larger. In uncharted territory, things don't always go in line with the plan.
Nevertheless, we are optimistic.
The age-old adage rings true: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
We have already got gained the most knowledge from the OSIRIS-REx mission, and that we will continue exploring and problem-solving with the identical bold determination that has taken us to this point. The Conversation
Elizabeth Cantwell, Professor of Practice for Aerospace and engineering science and Senior vice chairman for Research & Innovation, University of Arizona.
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