Sept 24 (Reuters) – A NASA space capsule carrying the largest soil sample ever scooped from an asteroid’s surface passed through Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday and parachuted into the Utah desert, picking up celestial specimens. Delivered to scientists.
The gumdrop-shaped capsule ejected when the Osiris-Rex robot spacecraft passed within 67,000 miles (107,826 kilometers) of Earth hours earlier was designated west of Salt Lake City in the U.S. military’s vast Utah test. The aircraft landed within the landing zone. training range.
The final descent and landing, broadcast on a NASA livestream, capped a six-year joint mission between the U.S. space agency and the University of Arizona. This is the third asteroid sample ever returned to Earth for analysis, following two similar missions completed in 2010 and 2020 by the Japanese space agency, and the largest to date. It was something.
After landing, the capsule rested nose down on the sandy floor of the Utah desert, its red and white parachute slowing its high-speed descent until it came to rest just a few feet after separation.
Although there was some doubt as to whether the backup chute had deployed properly, the main chute deployed as planned and the capsule landed softly and almost perfectly.
“When I heard, ‘We found the main chute,’ I literally cried,” Dante Lauretta, a scientist at the University of Arizona who has been part of the project since its inception and watched the descent from a helicopter, told a news conference. .
“We touched down as soft as a pigeon,” said Tim Preiser, a Lockheed Martin engineer who worked on the project.
OSIRIS-REx collected its specimen three years ago from Bennu, a small carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999. Because space rocks pass relatively close to the Earth every six years, they are classified as “near-Earth objects,” but the possibility of them having an impact is thought to be low.
Bennu, which is apparently made of a loose collection of rocks resembling a pile of rubble, is just 500 meters (547 yards) in diameter, wider than the Empire State Building, but smaller than the asteroid Chicxulub, which crashed into Earth about 66 million years ago. Small in comparison. Previously, we made dinosaurs extinct.
primordial relics
Like other asteroids, Bennu is a relic of the early solar system. Because their current chemistry and mineralogy have changed little since their formation some 4.5 billion years ago, they contain valuable clues about the origin and development of rocky planets like Earth.
It is also possible that they contain organic molecules similar to those required for the emergence of microorganisms.
Three years ago, the Japanese space probe Hayabusa2 brought back a sample from the nearby asteroid Ryugu, which was found to contain two organic compounds, including comets, asteroids, and meteorites that collided with the early Earth. This confirms the hypothesis that astronomical objects seeded the young planet with organic compounds. Ingredients are the source of life.
Osiris-Rex was launched in September 2016, reached Bennu in 2018, and continued to orbit the asteroid for about two years, collecting samples of loose material on the surface with a robotic arm on October 20, 2020. I got close enough to do it.
The spacecraft departed Bennu in May 2021 and embarked on a 1.2 billion mile (1.9 billion km) cruise back to Earth, including two orbits around the sun.
Roughly 13 minutes before landing, the capsule hit the upper atmosphere at 35 times the speed of sound, burning red as it plummeted toward Earth, reaching temperatures in its heat shield of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 degrees Celsius).
The Bennu sample is estimated to weigh 250 grams (8.8 ounces), far larger than the 5 grams returned from Ryugu in 2020 and the smaller specimen delivered from asteroid Itokawa in 2010.
A recovery team of scientists and technicians was on hand to retrieve the capsule and protect the samples from contamination on Earth.
The dark capsule and its valuable contents were taken by helicopter to a “clean room” at a test site in Utah for initial testing. On Monday it was taken on a military transport plane to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and on Tuesday it was promised to about 200 scientists from 60 laboratories around the world to subdivide the sample into smaller specimens. The canister is scheduled to be opened.
Meanwhile, the main part of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is expected to sail to explore Apophis, another asteroid closer to Earth.
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Maria Caspani in New York and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California.Editing: Rosalba O’Brien, Matthew Lewis, Donna Bryson, Mark Porter
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