It's one of NASA's most audacious robotic space missions. This weekend, if a lot of things go right, a capsule carrying 250 grams of material from the asteroid Bennu will touch down in the military's Utah Test and Training Range. The OSIRIS-REx mission collected the precious sample in October 2020. On September 5, an airplane dropped a replica of the return capsule into the desert site.
The replica used in tests with Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta of one of NASA's partners, the University of Arizona.
The parachutes worked well, and the replica was recovered without incident or damage. Still, such a recovery is always a risky endeavor, and the mission team has its collective fingers crossed.
In 2004, the Genesis mission capsule, carrying samples of a comet along with interstellar particles. crash-landed at 322 km/hr when its parafoil, intended to slow it while a helicopter snagged it in mid-air) failed to deploy. Fortunately, much of the material was still recovered. OSIRIS-REx went with a more traditional parachute recovery. That is the same system used successfully by the Stardust mission, The Stardust capsule, with samples similar to those on Genesis, landed in 2006.
News items usually mention that Bennu has a microscopic chance of colliding with Earth in 2182, but NASA hopes we don't have to wait that long for a sample. The asteroid has been described as "the size of a skyscraper."
See tomorrow's blog!
Matt Bille is a writer, historian, and naturalist living in Colorado Springs. He can be reached at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com. Website: www.mattbilleauthor.com. He is the lead author of The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites (Texas A&M, 2004).
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