Source: London-Arabia.net and agencies
–
On Tuesday, NASA made a stunning breakthrough, achieved by a vehicle called OSIRIS-Rex, when it launched it 4 years ago to the mobile asteroid Bennu, 334 million kilometers between Earth and Mars. 2023 in the Utah desert in the US west, in the first operation in which the United States obtains something from an asteroid.
And yesterday evening, Wednesday, a team from NASA held a press conference, in which they talked about the “Benno”, which is 510 meters in diameter, and contains an invaluable treasure, materials from the early solar system, which have not changed for billions of years, and may provide insight into the origin of life and how It sprouted on the ground and developed. They also showed a video of the process of capturing samples from the surface of “Benno” after landing on it for 10 seconds. It was enough for the arm to pick up only 60 grams of gravel, particles and scattered dust, and transfer it to the vehicle, which will soon start a 3-year journey back to Earth.
As for the landing, which took 4 hours and 50 minutes, it was so accurate that Dante Lauretta, the chief investigator at NASA for the mission, said she could hardly believe what she saw, when the vehicle extended a robotic arm of 3.30 meters long, and picked up whatever was available from the surface, according to What appears in a video now shown by “Al Arabiya.net”, and it took 18 minutes and a half to reach the vehicle that sent it to Earth at a speed of light of 300 thousand kilometers per second. Nevertheless, it will take the scientists a few days to announce the success of the mission in full, although “Osiris Rex” fully implemented the planned instructions, as the curators of NASA said at the press conference.
The vehicle, the size of a van, arrived in 2018 at the “Benno” traveling in space at a speed of more than 100,000 kilometers per hour, and began accompanying and studying its roaming since that year, until Tuesday came when samples were taken from a 16-meter high site, which they called Nightingale or The Nightingale is located in the northern hemisphere of the asteroid, because it is the most devoid of large rocks and stones that are difficult for a robotic arm to capture. However, the arm released compressed nitrogen gas to move the surface of the target area, scattering its fine and grainy materials, capturing what could be considered almost the most important astronomical penetration.
These samples, similar to what a French soldier discovered in 1799 during Napoleon’s campaign against Egypt, which is the “Rosetta Stone” that enabled archaeologists to identify the secrets of the hieroglyphic language “so they reveal to us the entire history of our planet, and about the solar system over billions of years ago.” In the words of the scientist Thomas Zurbuchen, head of the “Osiris Rex” scientific mission, considering that the components of “Benno” have not changed since the emergence of the Earth 4 billion and 500 million years ago, so it may contain the secrets of the first life and its basic materials, and it may also help to understand more about asteroids. It is likely a catastrophic collision with the earth, and among them is the “Bennu” that should be prepared for now.
– .
