© Reuters. An Atlas 5 rocket belonging to the United Launch Alliance, carrying on board the US Aeronautics and Space Administration’s OSIRIS-REx robotic spacecraft.
By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) – A NASA capsule will return to Earth on Sunday carrying the largest soil sample ever collected from an asteroid, as it is expected to penetrate the atmosphere and land in the Utah desert in the United States.
The capsule is scheduled to separate from the OSIRIS-REx robotic vehicle at 6:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT), carrying about a cup of the asteroid’s gravel material, culminating a seven-year journey.
The success of the mission, which is a joint effort between NASA and the University of Arizona, will result in the transfer of the third asteroid sample, the largest sample ever, to Earth for analysis, after two similar missions by the Japanese Space Agency that ended in 2010 and 2020.
OSIRIS-REx collected its sample from the asteroid Bennu, which is a small asteroid rich in carbon compounds that was discovered in 1999 and is classified as a “near-Earth object” because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years, but the chances of a collision are remote.
Bennu appears to be formed from a disassembled group of rocks and is only 500 meters wide, but it is small compared to the Chicxulub asteroid that struck the Earth about 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
The OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft was launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu in 2018. It then spent about two years orbiting the asteroid before getting close enough to extract a sample from its surface with its robotic arm on October 20, 2020.
The spacecraft set off on a 1.2 billion-mile journey back to Earth in May 2021, which included orbiting the sun twice.
The Bennu sample is estimated at about 250 grams, which far exceeds the sample transported from the Ryugu asteroid in 2020, which amounted to five grams, and the small sample that came from the Itokawa asteroid in 2010.
Scientists hope that the capsule and the inner box containing the asteroid material will arrive safely during re-entry and landing in order to preserve the purity of the sample and not be contaminated.
(Prepared by Sameh Al-Khatib for the Arab Bulletin – Edited by Salma Negm)
