The Osiris-Rex mission took samples of the asteroid Determine and now travels back to Earth, where It will arrive on September 24 and drop its cargo on the Utah desert (USA) in a complex operation, reported the NASA.
Osiris-Rex has passed seven years in space during which he traveled to Bennu, landed and took samples of its rocky surface before returning. Now that the mission is nearing its end, the challenge will be to parachute the sample, protecting it from heat, vibrations and terrestrial contaminants.
This It will be the first time that NASA has carried out an operation of this type.which the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) already did in a similar way in 2020, when its Hayabusa2 probe returned with samples of the Ryugu asteroid, which it dropped in a capsule over a desert area of Australia.
On September 24, when the spacecraft flies over Earth, it will drop the sample capsule, which is expected to enter the atmosphere around 14:41 GMT, bringing Osiris-Rex to the end of its primary mission.
Until the capsule is opened, the exact amount of material collected will not be knownalthough it is confirmed that the 60 grams marked by NASA as the minimum objective were reached.
The capsule will land on US Defense Department property that is part of the Utah Test and Training Range and the Dugway Proving Grounds, NASA said in a statement.
Once on the ground, “the team will race against time to recover it and take it to the safety of a provisional white room (with strict security and cleaning measures), “explained the deputy director of the project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Mike Moreau.
Recovery teams will helicopter the capsule to a first portable clean room and collect soil and air samples around, to help identify if any tiny contaminants came into contact with the asteroid sample.
From now until September, the team in charge will practice and refine the procedures necessary to retrieve the sample in Utah and transport it to the laboratory.
There it will be unpacked and a quarter will be distributed to the mission science team around the world for analysis, while the rest will be preserved for other scientists to study, now and in future generations.
Asteroids, which are the ancient materials left over from the age of planet formation, could contain molecular precursors to life and provide clues to the formation of the oceans and the solar system.
The importance of the Ryugu and Bennu samples taken directly from their surfaces is that they are pristine material, which has not been exposed to any terrestrial contamination, as can happen with pieces of asteroids that have fallen on our planet.