Up to date 6:30 p.m. Jap with feedback from post-landing briefing.
KIHEI, Hawaii — A capsule from a NASA spacecraft landed within the Utah desert Sept. 24, finishing a seven-year mission to return samples from a close to Earth asteroid.
The pattern return capsule from the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Useful resource Identification, and Safety-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, spacecraft touched down within the Utah Check and Coaching Vary at 10:52 a.m. Jap. The touchdown passed off 10 minutes after the capsule, touring at 44,500 kilometers per hour, entered the Earth’s ambiance, 4 hours after the capsule separated from the principle spacecraft.
The touchdown passed off three minutes sooner than the nominal timeline for the capsule’s return. NASA mentioned on the touchdown webcast that the principle parachute opened at a a lot larger altitude than deliberate: about 6,000 meters versus the anticipated 1,500 meters.
At a post-landing press convention, mission officers mentioned that whereas a drogue parachute did deploy upfront of the principle parachute, there was not clear how nicely the drogue carried out, as there was no visible affirmation that the drogue had inflated.
“One thing in our sequence might or might not have behaved itself precisely the best way we anticipated it to, however the subsequent issues within the sequence made up for it,” mentioned Tim Priser, chief engineer for deep house exploration at Lockheed Martin, which constructed the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. “On the finish of the day, when that principal chute deployed, it mainly corrected something that will have occurred forward of it.”
The capsule landed about eight kilometers from the middle of the ultimate touchdown ellipse, which prolonged 12 by 30 kilometers, mentioned Mike Moreau, deputy mission supervisor for the mission at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle. That was not sudden, he mentioned, as forecasted atmospheric variations predicted a touchdown to the east of the middle.
The capsule itself was in good situation after touchdown, mentioned Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx on the College of Arizona, who was a part of the workforce who recovered the capsule. “There was no signal of any injury or distortions of the warmth defend and backshell that we might see,” he mentioned, past the anticipated charring of the outside from reentry. “We just about caught the touchdown.”
The restoration workforce took the capsule to a short lived clear room on the Dugway Proving Floor for preliminary work to take away the capsule’s warmth defend and backshell. Eileen Stansbery, chief scientist on the Johnson House Middle, mentioned there was no register that preliminary work that any of the asteroid samples collected had leaked out of the canister containing them contained in the capsule.
NASA launched OSIRIS-REx in September 2016 on an Atlas 5, and the spacecraft arrived at Bennu in 2018. After learning the asteroid’s floor from orbit, scientists chosen a location on the floor to carry out a “contact and go” maneuver the place the spacecraft would descend the floor, briefly plunging a sampling gadget into the floor to gather materials from the asteroid earlier than retreating.
That sampling maneuver passed off in October 2020 and labored virtually too nicely, gathering a lot materials from the floor of Bennu that engineers accelerated the stowage of the pattern container into the return capsule after photos confirmed some materials leaking into house.
Venture officers mentioned that whereas they weren’t capable of measure how a lot materials was within the pattern canister, they believed they far exceeded the mission requirement of 60 grams of fabric. Lauretta mentioned at a Sept. 22 briefing that the mission estimated the capsule carried 250 grams of fabric, plus or minus 101 grams. “Even on the low finish of that finish estimate, we’re nicely above our mission necessities,” he mentioned.
The pattern container can be transported to a curation facility on the Johnson House Middle Sept. 25. As soon as there, scientists will start a meticulous course of to take away the samples to keep away from contamination and permit scientific examine to start. NASA cautioned, although, that the trouble could also be placed on maintain if there’s a federal authorities shutdown due to a lapse of funding on Oct. 1.
Lauretta mentioned on the post-landing briefing that some preliminary evaluation of samples might start as quickly as Sept. 26, when the canister is opened and a few mud on its floor is collected.
The primary OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which carried out a maneuver 20 minutes after capsule separation to soundly by by Earth, will now start an prolonged mission known as OSIRIS-APEX. It’s going to journey to a different close to Earth asteroid, Apophis, arriving shortly after the asteroid makes an Earth flyby in 2029.
Lauretta will stay centered on the pattern evaluation of a mission he has been concerned with for practically 20 years, when Lockheed Martin and the College of Arizona proposed partnering on an asteroid pattern return mission. “It was like assembly an outdated good friend that I hadn’t seen for a very long time,” he mentioned of encountering the capsule after touchdown. “I knew we had executed it. We had pulled it off.”
