DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah — The atmosphere was electric on the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground as all eyes were on the OSIRIS-REx mission’s sample return capsule during its 83-mile (133 kilometers) descent from space to the desert floor. Nearly twenty years of planning, problem-solving and patience culminated in a dramatic and highly-choreographed recovery operation that took place at one of the vital distant and isolated army bases within the continental United States.
Anxiety felt by onlookers was palpable as 4 helicopters operated by NASA and the U.S. Air Force took off just after 7 a.m. local time from the Michael Army Air Field. They were headed northwest into the barren sands of the U.S. Department of Defense’s sprawling Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) nearly an hour before a capsule containing priceless samples of asteroid Bennu was set to enter Earth’s atmosphere at 27,000 mph (43,450 km/h).
But emotions were much higher aboard one in all the helicopters waiting for the capsule.
During a press briefing held on Sunday (Sept. 24) in a hangar at Michael Army Airfield, Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission, described what was going through his mind while riding in a recovery helicopter to the capsule’s landing zone. Lauretta was on his strategy to see if the mission he’d spent 20 years of his life planning for would end with a successful recovery or with a smoking crater within the Utah desert.
“I used to be just attempting to ensure I didn’t totally break down in front of a global audience, right? It’s like, okay, you bought to maintain it together,” Lauretta said regarding his initial uncertainty about whether or not the capsule’s two parachutes had opened as designed. Luckily, a number of minutes later, word got here that the fundamental parachute indeed deployed. And shortly after, Lauretta received word that the landing was a convincing success.
“That is once I just emotionally let it go. , tears were streaming down my eyes. I used to be like, okay, that is the only thing I needed to listen to. From this point on, we all know what to do. We’re secure. We’re home. We did it.”
Related: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey
Lauretta elaborated more concerning the tension and release he experienced as he waited to listen to if the capsule’s parachute had fully opened because it sped through the atmosphere. “I knew things were presupposed to be happening on a nominal timeline; that I wasn’t getting call outs. But again, we could have just have radio dropouts there. After which we heard ‘fundamental chute detected,’ and I literally broke into tears.”
“I knew the moment the chute open, that was it. We knew what to do,” Lauretta continued. “There have been no surprises left. And it was overwhelming relief, gratitude, pride, awe and really attempting to persuade myself that I wasn’t dreaming, that it was actually happening, that the chute was open that the capsule was coming down and we got that science treasure in hand.”
The uncertainty over the parachute was brought on by the proven fact that mission teams were unable to find out if the capsule’s drogue chute had deployed or not. Drogue parachutes (or drogue chutes) are typically smaller parachutes that deploy from a craft moving at high speeds with a view to either slow the craft, stabilize its movement or to assist deploy a second, larger fundamental parachute.
From their vantage points on the bottom and in multiple aircraft providing live footage of the capsule’s return to Earth, recovery teams were unable to see if the 31.5-inche (80-centimeter) drogue chute had deployed at 102,300 feet (31,181 meters) as planned.
Through the post-landing press briefing on Sunday, Mike Moreau, deputy project manager for the OSIRIS-REx mission at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, explained that while his team continues to be unsure if, in actual fact, the drogue chute deployed in any respect, it ultimately is a moot point since the fundamental parachute did, in actual fact, deploy.
“We do not know if the drogue chute deployed. Because we do not know if we will see that within the imagery. The imagery that we saw was not positive,” Moreau said. “What we do know is that the fundamental parachute got here out. It got here out just a little bit sooner than we expected, but that point difference was inside the family of variation that we expect from the atmosphere. In order that will not be really a surprise to us.”
While the capsule’s successful landing could be the tip of this stage of the mission, drogue chute or not, it marks the start of a complete latest chapter of groundbreaking science.
Lauretta and other scientists around the globe can now begin studying the samples and analyzing the Bennu’s composition so as glean information concerning the chemical history of our solar system.
The rocks and mud samples taken from asteroid Bennu might be divided up for study amongst various scientific institutions and space agencies to assist scientists around the globe begin answering a number of the most burning questions on our cosmic neighborhood — and possibly even help us understand how life got began here on Earth.
Because asteroids formed when our solar system was quite young, the evaluation of those samples could help reveal how water — and even the constructing blocks of life, akin to amino acids — made their strategy to our planet as asteroids bombarded a young Earth.
And, though these samples will soon be in scientists’ hands for years of study, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is not finished with its groundbreaking scientific mission.
While the probe was designed to only take a sample from one asteroid, it still has loads of science left in store. It is going to now make a two-year journey to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis under the name OSIRIS-APEX, where it’ll study the space rock up close to assist scientists higher understand the characteristics of one more relic of the early solar system.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) launched in 2016 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida to go to asteroid Bennu and collect samples from the space rock for return to Earth.
The mission is NASA’s first such asteroid sampling mission, however the third worldwide (Japan’s Hayabusa-1 and Hayabusa-2 previously returned space rock samples).
The OSIRIS-REx probe reached Bennu in 2018, spent two years orbiting its subject, and eventually collected a sample from the asteroid’s surface in 2020. Then, the spacecraft began its 1.2-billion-mile (1.9 billion km) return voyage on May 10, 2021.