NASA’s $800 million osiris rex The mission launched into space in September 2016 with a simple but ambitious goal: to travel to a distant asteroid and bring back samples. The spacecraft is now nearing its return, and scientists spotted it for the first time last week.
The asteroid in question is Bennu, a debris pile asteroid that scientists believe was the result of a larger asteroid that broke up between 700 million and 2 billion years ago. According to NASA. Bennu orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 105 million miles, completing one orbit every 1.2 years.At the time, the asteroid was about 200 million miles (322 million kilometers) away. osiris rex We arrived there to retrieve some of it.
OSIRIS-REx observed and imaged Bennu from December 2018 to May 2021, measuring its rotation, shape, and composition. Bennu’s rocky surface contains hints about how the solar system formed, but that’s all that observations of this celestial body can provide. Therefore, it is a sample return project.
In addition to being caught on candid camera, mission planners last week altered Osiris-Rex’s orbit to properly point it at the sample drop site on Earth. To ensure that Osiris-Rex actually arrived at Earth rather than passing through a pale blue dot, the spacecraft’s speed was adjusted in increments of about half a mile per hour (less than one kilometer per hour).
spaceship I took a sample of Bennu. In 2020.it left the asteroid Round trip in April 2021. The spacecraft was 2.9 million miles (4.66 million km) from Earth when it was discovered by the European Space Agency’s Optical Ground Station (OGS) telescope on September 16. This image is actually a combination of 90 36 second exposures he took.
The ESA telescope on Tenerife was built to discover space debris, but now it also contributes to astronomical research and observations. near-earth asteroidwhich can be a dangerous object when it gets close to Earth.
Bennu itself is one of the Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA) as it could collide with Earth within 161 years. but, their probability is very low. No, Bennu’s probably biggest impact on Earth will come in the form of Osiris-Rex samples and what they can tell us about the formation of the universe.
Read more: Samples from asteroid suggest space rocks brought the raw materials for life to Earth