WASHINGTON: A NASA probe orbiting an asteroid over 100 million miles from Earth will make a perilous attempt on Tuesday to snatch a sample from the celestial body’s rocky surface to bring home the space agency’s first handful of pristine asteroid rocks.
"A lot of things could go wrong because the spacecraft's about the size of a van, and the asteroid has a lot of boulders in it,” Lucy Lim, a planetary scientist at NASA, said. “So we have to go between the boulders to get our sample, and a lot of planning went into that.” A collection device attached to the arm and shaped like an oversized shower head will ‘touch’ Bennu’s surface for five seconds and shoot out a burst of nitrogen gas, kicking up debris and entrapping rocky material inside the device’s sampling head.If successful, ground controllers will confirm capture of Bennu remnants a few hours after the attempt. That will allow the spacecraft to start its journey back toward Earth arriving in 20230 to return the first U.S. cache of pristine asteroid rocks.
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