NASA will reveal to the world today (October 10) the results of its first asteroid sample return mission.
The agency will host a webcast today at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) to reveal the asteroid dirt and gravel that the OSIRIS-REx mission sent to Earth last month.
You can watch the event live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, OR Directly through the agency.
Related: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx rover landed samples from the asteroid Bennu on Earth after a historic 4 billion mile journey.
Members of the OSIRIS-REx processing team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center begin the process of ejecting and inverting the TAGSAM (touch-and-go sampling mechanism) from the mission’s space science avionics surface. (Image credit: NASA/James Blair)
The $1.2 billion OSIRIS-REx mission launched in September 2016 toward the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, a carbon-rich space rock about 1,650 feet (500 meters) in diameter.
The probe achieved its goal in December 2018, setting a record for the smallest cosmic body ever orbited by a spacecraft. In October 2020, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft swooped in and sampled Bennu, and surprisingly fell deep into the asteroid’s surface.
The following May, OSIRIS-REx began its long journey back to Earth. The journey culminated in the parachute-assisted landing of the return capsule in the northern Utah desert on September 24.
The precious cargo brought home in the capsule is now at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. JSC employees processed, formatted and stored the Bennu material, which will be studied by researchers around the world for years to come, looking for clues about the early days of the solar system and how life began on Earth. (Some scientists believe that Bennu-like asteroids seeded our planet with organic molecules – the carbon-containing building blocks of life – through past collisions.)
Mission team members have started analyzing some of the asteroid material. NASA officials said they will reveal some of their initial results via webcast later today.
We’ll also take a closer look at the samples and, most likely, find out how many of them there are. The OSIRIS-REx rover picked up about 8.8 ounces (250 grams) of Bennu grains during its sampling dive, but that’s just a preliminary estimate of landing, the mission team said. (OSIRIS-REx was supposed to return at least 2.1 ounces, or 60 grams of material, a goal it almost certainly met.)
Only the OSIRIS-REx return capsule landed in Utah last month. A larger spacecraft flew past Earth, on its way to another asteroid – the famous Apophis. The probe is scheduled to arrive at Apophis in 2029 and study it in depth, in an additional mission called OSIRIS-APEX.
2023-10-11 13:04:26
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