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The first NASA's mission to visit an asteroid and report a sample of its dust on Earth arrived Monday at its destination, Bennu, two years after the launch of Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The unmanned 800 million mission US dollars, called OSIRIS-REx, met the asteroid around 12:10 pm (3:10 pm in Brasilia).
"We have arrived," said Javier Cerna, a Lockheed Martin engineer, while his colleagues responsible for the mission in Littleton, Colorado, celebrated and exchanged greetings, a live broadcast broadcast on NASA television.
Bennu is about 500 meters in diameter, about the size of a small mountain. It is the smallest object ever put into orbit by a man made spacecraft.
Bennu, a fragment of the original solar system, is also considered potentially dangerous. There is a slight risk – one in 2,700 – that collides with the Earth in 2135.
The carbon-rich asteroid was chosen from around 500,000 solar system asteroids as it revolves around the Earth's trajectory around the Sun. the right size for scientific studies and is one of the oldest asteroids known to NASA.
Scientists hope that he will tell more about the early formation of the solar system and how to find valuable resources like metals and water in asteroids.
"With asteroids, you have a time capsule.You have a complete sample of the state of the solar system billions of years ago," said Michelle Thaller, Goddard spokeswoman Space Flight Center of NASA.
"That's why, for scientists, this sample will be much more valuable than gold."
– "Smooth high-five" –
The mission was launched in September 2016. Throughout the last few months, OSIRIS REX has slowly moved to Bennu and finally reached the space when it was about 129 million kilometers from Earth.
"In recent months, Bennu has begun to focus on my approach," said the OSIRIS-REx account on Twitter. "Now that I am here, I will fly around the asteroid and study it in detail.
The satellite is equipped with a set of five scientific instruments to study the asteroid for a year and a half, to map it at high resolution to help scientists decide exactly where collect sample.
By 2020, he will extend his robotic arm and play the asteroid in a maneuver that Rich Kuhns, head of the OSIRIS-REx program at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, described as a "soft-high" five "English that can be translated as" play here ").
Using a circular device much like a car's air filter and an inverted vacuum system to lift and collect dust, the device aims to extract about 60 grams of material from the surface of the asteroid and to bring him back to Earth for a while. study.
NASA says you can get a lot more material, maybe up to two pounds.
The US Space Agency hopes to use OSIRIS-REx to bring Earth the largest payload of space samples since the Apollo era in the 1960s and 1970s, when American explorers had collected and transported 382 kg of lunar rocks.
The Japanese space agency Jaxa proved for the first time that the collection of samples from an asteroid was possible.
In 2010, the Jaxa Hayabusa spacecraft landed on the surface of its target asteroid and managed to bring a few micrograms of material to Earth.
Once NASA's mission has successfully collected Bennu's dust, the sample will be kept in a container and transported to Earth in 2023 to land in the Utah desert at the end of September, announced the agency.
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