If the asteroids are brought back to earth, it will be triumph or a crash
Asteroid sampling in the early solar system: dream of Dante Lauretta and the return of a small capsule to the Utah desert
On Sunday morning a small space capsule will come screeching down through the atmosphere towards the Utah desert if all goes well.
Dante Lauretta, the mission principal investigator, feels that it is a little hard to be happy because the program is coming to an end. He says that he is excited to get it into the laboratory so that he can do some amazing science. His University of Arizona team will study the composition of the dust and rock fragments in the container and trace any organic molecules they may harbor. The scientists will also be able to compare samples of Bennu to Ryugu.
The 4.5-billion-year-old pebbles in the return capsule are thought to have been leftovers from the first years of the solar system.
Scientists want to study these rocks to learn more about the chemistry that ultimately led to the emergence of life on Earth — assuming the capsule parachutes down unscathed and its contents don’t get destroyed in a crash landing.
“That would be just heartbreaking, right?” says Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, the principal investigator for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, who compared that scenario to fumbling a football in the end zone while trying to make what would be a winning touchdown in the final seconds of a game.
For about two decades, Lauretta has worked on the asteroid-sampling effort, and says that he and his colleagues have experienced a number of nail-biting episodes along the way. They are waiting for the final one.
He sometimes experiences strange, vivid dreams because of the anxiety of the mission. He dreamed about a gift shop on the rocky asteroid.
“I was like, ‘How did I get this job? Lauretta thought that if we were to build a gift shop, why should he be stressing about getting all this sample? Right now, I can pick some up.
In a more recent dream, with the day of the sample’s return drawing ever closer, his dream-self opened up the capsule and saw, sitting on top of the black asteroid dirt, a shining green gem. He grabbed it and popped it in his mouth.
In reality, no one will ever be able to taste the asteroid rocks, although they might smell at some point. He wants a smell like ammonia or rotten eggs.
Lauretta says that no one expects alien life. Bennu has been pummeled with radiation for eons, making it highly inhospitable. His team worked with NASA’s planetary protection office, which found that returning bits of this asteroid to Earth required no special precautions.
“Mount Doom” and Nasa-Osiris: Bringing home asteroid rocks returns to utah
To reach a spot the size of a few parking spaces the team had to figure out how to maneuver the spacecraft around obstacles with names, such as “Mount Doom”, that were nicknames.
Shockingly, the arm basically plunged in, as the asteroid behaved more like a liquid than a solid, suggesting it’s composed of rocky bits just barely held together by gravity.
They’d grabbed so much that a Mylar flap that was supposed to seal up the collection device had gotten jammed open by a rock that appeared to be about an inch across. A gap was created that allowed dust to escape. They were shown floating away from the on-board camera.
The moment was “gut-wrenching,” says a project scientist for the mission. Every particle is a discovery that is not made. It was not easy.
They estimate that they protected about 8 ounces of asteroid rock, but won’t know for sure until they open the canister.
Once they do that, they expect to see dust, pebbles, and larger rocks, just like the one Lauretta calls the troublemaker, which kept their collection device from shutting down.
Source: NASA effort to bring home asteroid rocks will end this weekend in triumph or a crash
OSIRIS-REx Apophis: A High-Energy Mars Mission for Lunar Detection at NASA’s Johnson Space Center
OSIRIS-REx has asteroid adventures ahead of it as well. After delivering its cargo, the spacecraft will speed past Earth and keep going. Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid that will reach it’s destination in 2029.
This will occur when the spacecraft is about 67,000 miles away, and the capsule will be aimed at a target zone in the desert that’s about 250 square miles.
“It’s the equivalent of throwing a dart across the length of a basketball court and hitting the bullseye,” says Rich Burns, the project manager based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The capsule will use a drogue chute to make sure it’s stable. After seven minutes into it’s descent, it will open its main parachute and drift to the ground. Recovery helicopters will get the first view of its rapid descent. The Utah Test and Training Range and the Dugway Proving Ground are located inside the Department of Defense, and should be well-suited for soft soil. It’s an active range, though, so before NASA personnel make their approach to retrieve the container, a military representative will check the area to make sure there’s no unexploded ordnance.
A parachute malfunction doomed NASA’s Genesis mission in 2004, which was returning with samples of solar wind particles. Lauretta says his team watched the video too many times.
Some researchers will take samples of soil and other materials from the landing site — just in case some kind of contamination occurs, despite their best efforts, and they later have to figure out what came from the asteroid and what was a terrestrial interloper.
If the capsule’s homecoming proceeds without a hitch, the asteroid sample will remain utterly untainted — making it different from space rocks that regularly fall to Earth and get collected as meteorites.
A canister will be flown to the NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Monday, where it will be used for moon rocks.
“As soon as the canister is opened, we will see dust adhere to the surfaces and put it in microscopes and other instruments,” he says.
What’s Left of the Asteroid Sample: The Relativistic Plan for Next-Generation Space-Rock Experiments
“It’ll be a slow process, very deliberate,” says Dworkin. There are tons of bolts that have to be loosened. Bennu material could be inside every screw head, so we have to take care of it.
The research team is planning a press conference on October 11 to explain everything they’ve found so far. About a quarter of the asteroid sample will immediately get farmed out to researchers, who have set up their labs to analyze it.
In the same way some Apollo moon rocks were left in sealed containers for 50 years before being studied, some of this will be saved for the future so that researchers can use technology that hasn’t been invented yet.
In October, the space agency will strap on the Psyche mission to an asteroid that’s nickel-iron and looks like the building block of planetary cores.
And, in November, NASA’s Lucy mission will fly by an asteroid called Dinkinesh, its first asteroid rendezvous in a planned 12-year tour that will take it to multiple space rocks that orbit the Sun at the distance of Jupiter. These asteroids are thought to be remnants from the formation of the outer planets.
The Recovery of a Small Parachutor from an Atmospheric Reentry and a Thermal Insulator for a Spacecraft
The capsule, which is small and circular, needs to go down to Earth before it can arrive on planet Earth. That will mean slowing from 28,000 miles per hour to just 11. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft for NASA and is responsible for the capsule recovery. “We have done sample returns before, so we know what we are talking about,” says a systems engineer at the program manager for OSIRIS-REx. “We know we can do this, but there’s always a risk when you’re bringing something back to Earth. atmospheric reentry is a very fiery experience. You have enough parachutes that need to deploy. There are a lot of things that need to go right.
In order to save it from being hurtled through the atmosphere, the capsule has a built-in heat shield. You need protection for a payloads when it’s brought through the atmosphere. It can be pretty gnarly,” says Todd White, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, who worked on the spacecraft’s thermal protection system. The heat shield is lightweight and ablative, which means that it slowly burns off. “It looks nice and brown on the back and white on the front—but when it lands it’ll look charred and crispy,” White says.
