Get ready for an interplanetary treasure hunt. Today NASA will launch its first mission to visit an asteroid and bring precious samples back to Earth.
Get ready for an interplanetary treasure hunt. Today NASA will launch its first mission to visit an asteroid and bring precious samples back to Earth.
OSIRIS-REx, set to launch around 7:05 p.m. EDT, will head to Bennu, a dark rubble-pile of an asteroid that stretches 492 meters (1,614 feet) wide. After the spacecraft reaches and orbits the near-Earth asteroid in 2018 and carries samples back to Earth, scientists hope to develop a detailed profile to shed light on the early evolution of the solar system, clues to the origin of life and tools that will allow them to accurately track asteroids that come uncomfortably close to Earth.
The spacecraft, aboard an Atlas V rocket, was rolled out to the launch pad Wednesday morning. Jason Dworkin, the mission’s project scientist, called the attitude among the team at Cape Canaveral “excited optimism.”
“We’re ready to go,” Dworkin said in an interview, “and excited to see the spacecraft fly.”
OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) is bringing a suite of instruments that will help it understand Bennu in unprecedented detail. It will use several cameras to examine the surface, a laser altimeter to map the 3-dimensional topography, visible- and infrared-light spectrometers to study its chemical and mineral composition and an X-ray spectrometer to study elemental abundances.
It also holds an arm with a disclike device at the end that will carefully contact the surface and collect some of the dust and rock that scientists think cover Bennu’s surface.
“We are basically a space vacuum cleaner,” principal investigator Dante Lauretta said in a briefing Wednesday.