After two years of launch of a NASA spacecraft, now it is coming very close to an ancient asteroid, Bennu, to get a sample of space dust that could help the space scientists to get clues of how the life started in the solar system.
The spacecraft clicked its first, blurry picture of space cosmic body which can be compared to the size of small mountain and at least 500 yards in diameter. The name of the cosmic body is OSIRIS-REx.
The spacecraft has been designed in a way that it can circle Bennu and can extend itself with a robotic arm to “high-five” its surface then return to the Earth in 2023 with the sample it has collected in 2023.
The first instance of Bennu’s shots was on August 17 at a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from the spacecraft location. The cost for building the aircraft is around USD 800 million.
“This is the closest we have even been to Bennu,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
“This is significant in that we are now in the vicinity of the asteroid, closer than we have ever been even during the close approaches of the asteroid to the Earth.”
Among almost 500,000 asteroids in the solar system, Bennu was chosen for the reason that it orbits very close to the Earth’s path around the sun, and has also got the right size for the scientific study and is considered one of the oldest asteroids ever know to NASA.
But according to astronomers, the asteroid poses a slight risk in the future, that is, it can collide with Earth in 2135 with a chance of one in 2,700.
The asteroid was also found to be rich in carbon which comes under the category of those cosmic bodies which may have played a role in delivering life-giving materials to Earth billions of yeas ago.
The mission of OSIRIS-Rex is not the first such visit to an asteroid with an attempt to return with a sample – same type of mission was taken up by Japan and Europe earlier to that which managed to land on a comet.
But this kind is somewhat different to become the first asteroid-sample-return mission for NASA, and it is slated to bring back the a very large sample ever done with the weight of 2.1 ounces (60 grams).
In earlier space missions like that of the US men who returned to the Earth from the Moon with the Appollo era of the 1960s and 1970s along with a total of 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of moon rocks.
In the coming December, the spacecraft is slated to begin a detailed survey of asteroid’s surface, which according to NASA will be the “arrival” at the asteroid.
The insertion of the Orbital is expected to happen on December 31.
The sample, according to the agency, cannot be taken until July 2020.
The abbreviation OSIRIS-REx is for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.
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