
(AGENPARL) – dom 24 settembre 2023 September 24, 2023
RELEASE 23-109
*NASA’s First Asteroid Sample Has Landed, Now Secure in Clean Room*
The sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is seen shortly
after touching down in the desert, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023, at the Department
of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. The sample was collected from the
asteroid Bennu in October 2020 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.
*/Credits: NASA/Keegan Barber/*
After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins,
Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith
Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu
finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday,
in a targeted area of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training
Range near Salt Lake City.
Within an hour and a half, the capsule was transported by helicopter to a
temporary clean room set up in a hangar on the training range, where it now
is connected to a continuous flow of nitrogen.
Getting the sample under a “nitrogen purge,” as scientists call it, was
one of the OSIRIS-REx team’s most critical tasks today. Nitrogen is a gas
that doesn’t interact with most other chemicals, and a continuous flow of
it into the sample container inside the capsule will keep out earthly
contaminants to leave the sample pure for scientific analyses.
The returned samples collected from Bennu will help scientists worldwide make
discoveries to better understand planet formation and the origin of organics
and water that led to life on Earth, as well as benefit all of humanity by
learning more about potentially hazardous asteroids.
“Congratulations to the OSIRIS-REx team on a picture-perfect mission –
the first American asteroid sample return in history – which will deepen
our understanding of the origin of our solar system and its formation. Not to
mention, Bennu is a potentially hazardous asteroid, and what we learn from
the sample will help us better understand the types of asteroids that could
come our way,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “With OSIRIS-REx,
Psyche launch in a couple of weeks, DART’s one year anniversary, and
Lucy’s first asteroid approach in November, Asteroid Autumn is in full
swing. These missions prove once again that NASA does big things. Things that
inspire us and unite us. Things that show nothing is beyond our reach when we
work together.”
The Bennu sample – an estimated 8.8 ounces, or 250 grams – will be
transported in its unopened canister by aircraft to NASA’s Johnson Space
Center in Houston on Monday, Sept. 25. Curation scientists there will
disassemble the canister, extract and weigh the sample, create an inventory
of the rocks and dust, and, over time, distribute pieces of Bennu to
scientists worldwide.
Today’s delivery of an asteroid sample – a first for the U.S. – went
according to plan thanks to the massive effort of hundreds of people who
remotely directed the spacecraft’s journey since it launched [1] on Sept.
8, 2016. The team then guided it to arrival at Bennu [2] on Dec. 3, 2018,
through the search for a safe sample-collection site [3] between 2019 and
2020, sample collection [4] on Oct. 20, 2020, and during the return trip home
starting on May 10, 2021.
“Today marks an extraordinary milestone not just for the OSIRIS-REx team
but for science as a whole,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator
for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Successfully
delivering samples from Bennu to Earth is a triumph of collaborative
ingenuity and a testament to what we can accomplish when we unite with a
common purpose. But let’s not forget – while this may feel like the end
of an incredible chapter, it’s truly just the beginning of another. We now
have the unprecedented opportunity to analyze these samples and delve deeper
into the secrets of our solar system.”
After traveling billions of miles to Bennu and back, the OSIRIS-REx
spacecraft released its sample capsule toward Earth’s atmosphere at 6:42
a.m. EDT (4:42 a.m. MDT). The spacecraft was 63,000 miles (102,000
kilometers) from Earth’s surface at the time – about one-third the
distance from Earth to the Moon.
Traveling at 27,650 mph (44,500 kph), the capsule pierced the atmosphere at
10:42 a.m. EDT (8:42 a.m. MDT), off the coast of California at an altitude of
about 83 miles (133 kilometers). Within 10 minutes, it landed on the military
range. Along the way, two parachutes successfully deployed to stabilize and
slow the capsule down to a gentle 11 mph (18 kph) at touchdown.
“The whole team had butterflies today, but that’s the focused
anticipation of a critical event by a well-prepared team,” said Rich Burns,
project manager for OSIRIS-REx at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland. “For us, this was the World Series, ninth inning,
bases-loaded moment, and this team knocked it out of the park.”
Radar, infrared, and optical instruments in the air and on the ground tracked
the capsule to its landing coordinates inside a 36-mile by 8.5-mile
(58-kilometer by 14-kilometer) area on the range. Within several minutes, the
recovery team was dispatched to the capsule’s location to inspect and
retrieve it. The team found the capsule in good shape at 9:07 a.m. MDT (11:07
a.m. EDT) and then determined it was safe to approach. Within 70 minutes,
they wrapped it up for safe transport to a temporary clean room on the range,
where it remains under continuous supervision and a nitrogen purge.
NASA Goddard provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and
the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. The University of Arizona,
Tucson leads the science team and the mission’s science observation planning
and data processing. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the
spacecraft and provides flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are
responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Curation for
OSIRIS-REx, including processing the sample when it arrives on Earth, will
take place at NASA Johnson. International partnerships on this mission
include the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter instrument from CSA (the Canadian
Space Agency) and asteroid sample science collaboration with JAXA’s (the
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 mission. OSIRIS-REx is the
third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science
Mission Directorate in Washington.
To learn more about the asteroid sample recovery mission visit:
*https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex* [5]
-end-
*Press Contacts*
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1257 / 202-358-1501
Rani Gran / Rob Garner
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-332-6975 / 301-286-5687
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[1] https://blogs.nasa.gov/osiris-rex/2023/03/27/2016-nasas-osiris-rex-launches-from-earth/
[2] https://blogs.nasa.gov/osiris-rex/2023/03/28/2018-arrival-at-bennu-a-world-full-of-surprises/
[3] https://blogs.nasa.gov/osiris-rex/2023/03/29/2019-2020-choosing-a-touchdown-site-from-a-sea-of-hazards/
[4] https://blogs.nasa.gov/osiris-rex/2023/03/31/2020-2023-touchdown-and-goodbye/
[5] https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex