NASA asteroid sample parachutes safely over Utah desert

Sept 24 (Reuters) – A NASA space capsule carrying the largest soil sample ever extracted from the surface of an asteroid passed through Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday and parachuted into the Utah desert, delivering the specimen. heavenly to scientists.

The gumdrop-shaped capsule, launched from the robotic OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as the mothership passed within 67,000 miles (107,826 kilometers) of Earth hours earlier, landed within a designated landing zone west of Salt Lake City. at the vast Utah Test and Training Camp.

The final descent and landing, shown on a NASA live broadcast, culminated a six-year joint mission between the US space agency and the University of Arizona. It was only the third, and by far the largest, asteroid sample ever returned to Earth for analysis, following two similar missions by the Japanese space agency that ended in 2010 and 2020.

After landing, the capsule landed upside down on the sandy soil of the Utah desert, and a red and white parachute that slowed its high-speed descent came to rest a few meters away after detaching.

After some doubt about whether a preliminary parachute deployed correctly, the main parachute deployed as planned, bringing the capsule to a soft, near-perfect landing.

“We heard ‘main parachute detected’ and I literally burst into tears,” Dante Lauretta, a University of Arizona scientist who has been involved in the project since its inception and watched the descent from a helicopter, said at a news conference.

Tim Prizer, a Lockheed Martin engineer who was involved in the project, said: “We landed as soft as a pigeon.”

OSIRIS-REx collected its specimen three years ago from Bennu, a small carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999. The space rock is classified as a “near-Earth object” because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years, although the Las Chances of an impact are considered remote.

Apparently formed from a loose collection of rocks, like a pile of rubble, Bennu measures just 500 meters (547 yards) across, making it wider than the Empire State Building. It is tall but tiny compared to the Chicxulub asteroid that crashed into Earth about 66 million years ago. back, ending the dinosaurs.

PRIMORDIAL RELIC

Like other asteroids, Bennu is a relic of the early solar system. Because its current chemistry and mineralogy are virtually unchanged since it formed about 4.5 billion years ago, it contains valuable clues about the origins and development of rocky planets like Earth.

It may even contain organic molecules similar to those necessary for the appearance of microbes.

Samples returned three years ago by the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission from Ryugu, another near-Earth asteroid, were found to contain two organic compoundswhich reinforces the hypothesis that celestial objects such as comets, asteroids and meteorites that bombarded the early Earth seeded the young planet with the essential ingredients for life.

OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu in 2018, then spent nearly two years orbiting the asteroid before venturing close enough to take a sample of the loose surface material with its robotic arm on October 20, 2020.

The spacecraft departed Bennu in May 2021 for a 1.9 billion kilometer (1.2 billion mile) cruise back to Earth, including two orbits around the sun.

Hitting the upper atmosphere at 35 times the speed of sound about 13 minutes before landing, the capsule became red hot as it hurtled towards Earth and temperatures in its heat shield reached 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 C).

The Bennu sample has been estimated at 250 grams (8.8 ounces), far exceeding the 5 grams transported from Ryugu in 2020 or the small specimen delivered from the asteroid Itokawa in 2010.

A recovery team of scientists and technicians was present to recover the capsule and attempt to keep the sample free of terrestrial contamination.

The dark capsule and its precious contents were flown by helicopter to a “clean room” at the Utah Proving Ground for initial examination. It will be transported on Monday by a military transport plane to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the container will be opened on Tuesday so that samples can be divided into smaller specimens promised to about 200 scientists in 60 laboratories around the world.

Meanwhile, the main part of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is expected to sail to explore Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid.

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