NASA: asteroid sample expected to reach Earth on Sunday – 09/23/2023 – Science

A NASA space capsule carrying a sample of rocky material taken from an asteroid three years ago will return to Earth this weekend, undergoing a violent dive through the atmosphere before parachuting into the Utah desert on Sunday (24).

The weather forecast is favorable for the Osiris-Rex robotic spacecraft to return to release the capsule for the final descent, as planned, without further need for adjustments to the flight plan, NASA officials said in a press statement last Friday. fair (22).

Mission chiefs are hoping for a “precise” landing at the U.S. military area in Utah, west of Salt Lake City, said Sandra Freund, program manager at Lockheed Martin, which designed and assembled the spacecraft.

The rounded, teardrop-shaped capsule is expected to land by parachute at 11:55 Brasília time, around 13 minutes after reaching the top of the atmosphere at 35 times the speed of sound, ending a seven-year journey.

If successful, the Osiris-Rex mission, a joint effort by NASA and scientists from the University of Arizona, would bring the third asteroid sample to Earth and, by far, the largest. Two similar missions from Japan’s space agency have returned chunks of rock in the past 13 years.

Osiris-Rex collected the rock from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999 and classified as a “near-Earth object” because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years. Scientists have put the chances of it hitting Earth at 1 in 2,700 by the end of the 22nd century.

Bennu is small compared to other asteroids, measuring just 500 meters in diameter, slightly larger than the Empire State Building in height, but tiny compared to the cataclysmic Chicxulub, which hit Earth around 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs. non-avian.

Like other asteroids, Bennu is a relic of the early solar system, whose current chemistry and mineralogy have remained largely unchanged since its formation around 4.5 billion years ago.

Thus, it carries important clues about the origin and development of rocky planets like Earth, and may even contain organic molecules necessary for life.

“We are literally looking at geological materials that formed before Earth existed,” said Dante Lauretta, mission investigator at the University of Arizona.

Osiris-Rex was launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu in 2018. It spent nearly two years orbiting the asteroid before getting close enough to plant its robotic arm on the rocky surface on October 20, 2020. The spacecraft began its journey of almost 2 billion kilometers back to Earth in May 2021.