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NASA's first mission was to visit an asteroid and bring back a sample of its dust to Earth, arriving Monday at its destination, Bennu, two years after the launch of Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The $ 800 million unmanned mission, known as Osiris-rex, held a meeting with the asteroid around 12:10 pm (15:10 GMT).
"We have arrived," said Javier Cerna, a Lockheed Martin engineer, while his colleagues in charge of the mission in Littleton, Colorado, were celebrating and exchanging greetings, according to a live broadcast on television. from NASA.
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 small risk – one in 2,700 – that collides with the Earth in 2135.
The carbon-rich asteroid was chosen from around 500,000 asteroids in the solar system as it gravitates around the path of the Earth around the Sun. is 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 pure example of the solar system that existed billions of years ago," said Michelle Thaller, spokeswoman for the Goddard Space Flight Center. The NASA. "That's why, for scientists, this sample will be far more valuable than gold."
The mission was launched in September 2016. In recent months, Osiris-rex has been slowly directed to Bennu, and finally reached the space rock when it was about 129 million kilometers from Earth .
"In recent months, Bennu has started to focus as I get closer," the Osiris-rex Twitter account said. "Now that I am here, I will fly around the asteroid and study it in detail.
The spacecraft is equipped with a set of five scientific instruments to study the asteroid for a year and a half and map it in high resolution to help scientists decide exactly where sample collection.
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 air filter and an inverted vacuum system for lifting and collecting dust, the device is designed to extract about 60 grams of material from the surface of the asteroid and bring it back on 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 to 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 collecting samples from an asteroid was possible.
In 2010, the Jaxa Hayabusa spacecraft landed on the surface of its target asteroid and managed to bring to Earth a few micrograms of material.
Once NASA's mission has been successful in collecting Bennu's dust, the sample will be kept in a container and shipped to Earth in 2023 to land in the Utah desert at the end of September, announced the agency.
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