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"We are looking for something like a sandy beach with pebbles on it, something without big obstructions or big rocks," said Estelle Church, Lockheed Martin's assistant at the head of the spaceship arm called TAGSAM (mechanism Sample acquisition Touch and Go).
The ideal landing site will have an unobstructed area of at least 25 meters (82 feet) radius, with rocks not exceeding two centimeters (0.7 inches) in diameter.
"We need a site big enough for TAGSAM because we do not know exactly where we are going to land and we need rocks of the right size for the sample," Church said in an interview with Seeker.
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When the time is right, the spacecraft will approach Bennu with his arm outstretched. When the arm touches the surface, a gaseous nitrogen mechanism is triggered to throw dust. The dust should then adhere to a sample "head" attached to the arm. The arm includes a pogo-stick mechanism that will quickly push the probe away from Bennu, in the same way that floating astronauts use their arms or their legs to move away from a wall.
Before locking the sample and returning to Earth, the spacecraft will perform three of these touch procedures before arriving in 2023. It's a little different from the way the Japanese Hayabusa2 will collect material Asteroid at Itokawa in 2020. This mission uses a sampling horn that picks up materials after the spaceship has shot in the surface to stir the particles, Church said.
While TAGSAM's lead role will not come for two years, Church's team wants to make sure the arm is ready. At the end of October, he tried to move the arm for the first time in space. The next big step is scheduled for Wednesday, November 14th, when all arm capabilities for motion and imaging will be tested.
Church called the test a "very important and exciting milestone for Lockheed Martin". Of course, if the arm works as expected, it will also be an important milestone for NASA. This mission is the first time that the agency will have its own sample of asteroids on Earth.
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