When NASA’s OSIRIS-REX spacecraft touched the surface of an asteroid Tuesday to gather a sample of rocks and dirt, the operation proceeded smoothly, to the glee of the mission’s operators 200 million miles away on Earth.
“I must have watched about a hundred times last night,” Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the mission, said during a news conference Wednesday. The chances that spacecraft captured a sizable sample “have gone way, way up,” he said. It will still be a few days before scientists can confirm how much material was trapped within the sample collector, which resembles an automobile air filter.
The robotic arm with the sample collector at the end will be extended, and then the spacecraft will be nudged into a spin Saturday.The scientists will compare the rate of spin to what they measured before collecting a sample. Just as a skater with outstretched arms holding a barbell would spin slower than a skater holding nothing, OSIRIS-REX will spin slower depending on how much material was picked up.
The collection of the asteroid sample is the climax of the $800 million mission, which launched four years ago. The spacecraft has been making detailed observations of Bennu — a rock as wide as the Empire State Building is tall — for two years, mapping features of its surface as small as a couple of inches wide. It even discovered that Bennu was shooting debris from its surface into space.
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