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NASA’s asteroid sampling probe OSIRIS-REx will spend an additional two months on its target space rock before returning to Earth.
OSIRIS-REx grabbed a lot of earth and rock from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu 1,640 feet wide (500 meters) in October 2020 – so much, in fact, that the probe’s sample collector was overflowing literally.
The initial mission plan called for OSIRIS-REx to leave the vicinity of Bennu with this precious cargo on March 3. But the departure date has been pushed back to May 10, NASA officials said on Tuesday, January 26.
Related: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sampling mission in pictures
“Leaving the vicinity of Bennu in May puts us in the ‘sweet spot’, when the departure maneuver will consume the least fuel aboard the spacecraft,” Michael Moreau, deputy director of the OSIRIS-REx project at Goddard Space Flight Center in NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement from NASA.
“Nonetheless, with over 593 miles per hour (265 meters per second) of gear shifting, this will be the largest propulsive maneuver conducted by OSIRIS-REx since Bennu’s approach in October 2018,” added Moreau.
The new plan does not change the ETA for Bennu samples. They are still to descend to Earth, in a special return capsule, in northern Utah on September 24, 2023, NASA officials said in the same statement. (This touch will complement a recent sample return trifecta for humanity: Pristine samples from the moon and the asteroid Ryugu descended to Earth last month, thanks to the Chinese Chang’e 5 mission and the probe Japanese Hayabusa2, respectively.)
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Fuel efficiency isn’t the only potential benefit of Bennu’s new start date. The OSIRIS-REx team is studying the feasibility of carrying out a final close flyby of the asteroid, a “farewell tour” in April that would take the probe just two miles from the rugged surface of Bennu.
“We want to go back and say goodbye to Bennu and also document the state of the surface after the TAG,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona said Tuesday, during a virtual presentation at the 24th NASA Meeting. Small Agency Assessment Group. “We are optimistic that we can achieve this, but it is not yet guaranteed.”
“TAG” is a reference to the OSIRIS-REx “touch and go” sampling event on October 20, which significantly disturbed Bennu’s surface where it happened, the ground of a 20 meter wide crater called Nightingale. The spacecraft’s collector head penetrated 1.6 feet (48.8 centimeters) into the asteroid, Lauretta said. And the OSIRIS-REx thrusters stirred things up again during the probe’s “backward burn” that day.
OSIRIS-REx might have even more work to do after completing the farewell tour and depositing Bennu’s samples here on Earth. In 2022, the mission team plans to submit to NASA an extended mission proposal, which could involve sending OSIRIS-REx to closely study the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis just after the close flyby of Earth. by the asteroid in April 2029.
“It could be a date mission,” Lauretta said. “We could put the spacecraft into orbit; we could do all the global and site-specific characterization, like we did at Bennu. All the sample return material would be gone.”
Early analyzes suggest that there is no chance that OSIRIS-REx could gravity push Apophis through a “keyhole” that would place the asteroid on a future collision course with Earth, as long as the The spacecraft’s arrival would occur after Apophis flew over our planet in April 2029, Lauretta added.
“But we will continue to look at this,” he said.
Another possibility for the extended mission proposal, Lauretta added, is a rendezvous with the asteroid 1999 FA, which would take place some time before Apophis’ expected arrival.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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