Hey NASA, you have just landed your first samples from an asteroid! Where are they going next?
Houston, after all.
Wrapping up a seven-year-long, nearly four-billion-mile (6.4 billion kilometers) journey to the asteroid Bennu and back, the U.S. space agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft deployed its sample return capsule (SRC) to land within the Utah desert on Sunday (Sept. 24). A team of NASA scientists and Lockheed Martin engineers were on site inside a minute of the touchdown to start the strategy of retrieving the capsule and about half a pound (8.8 ounces or 250 grams) of rocks and soil that’s estimated to be on board.
After ensuring the realm was clear of any unexploded ordinance, the capsule landed as planned inside the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) — and when the well-traveled hardware was protected to approach, the team began securing the capsule and loading it right into a cradle. The latter was essential since it allowed the capsule to soon be hoisted by a helicopter and brought to a short lived clean room at UTTR.
“After we first come into the hangar, the team there’ll unbag the SRC and take a look at to wash off a number of the dirt and mud that that it may need picked up. We will not get it pristinely clean, but we will knock off big hunks of the desert floor,” Richard Witherspoon, Lockheed Martin’s OSIRIS-REx ground recovery lead, said in an interview with Space.com. “And they’re going to take scrapings from the warmth shield and back shell at the moment, which can go off for later evaluation.”
Related: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey
Once contained in the clean room, the SRC will start getting disassembled. By this point, there’s a probability scientists will get their very first have a look at samples from Bennu.
“We’re never expecting to reveal any sample while we’re within the cleanroom at UTTR. The one thing that is perhaps different though, is after we stowed the touch-and-go sample acquisition mechanism (TAGSAM) within the SRC [while still in orbit around Bennu], we did so quickly since the it was literally overflowing with regolith [soil] and the mylar flap that was purported to be a a technique valve was held open by a really large rock,” Witherspoon said. “So it’s possible that while we were stowing the TAGSAM, a little bit little bit of the regolith may need escaped and gotten trapped within the SRC.”
If that’s the case, the team will rigorously collect the escaped material while still in Utah.
Engineers will then remove the SRC’s heat shield and backshell so the 2 could be trucked to Lockheed Martin’s facilities in Denver for evaluation. That work may even expose the “avionics deck” for what is perhaps a very powerful step of this preliminary work.
“We want to get the samples under a nitrogen purge,” Witherspoon said. “There is a spot on the avionics deck where we’ll push in a needle through which we flow ultra-high purity nitrogen. That creates a positive pressure that [prevents Earth’s atmosphere from flowing in and contaminating the sample].”
The team will then wrap up the avionics deck and place your complete assembly right into a shipping container before retiring for the day.
From outer space to Houston
Early Monday morning (Sept. 25), the team will come together over again to load the partially disassembled capsule onto a C-17 military transport plane for an 8:00 a.m. MDT (10:00 a.m. EDT or 1400 GMT) flight to Ellington Field in Houston.
“Once on the bottom in Texas, we load all the equipment onto a box truck and caravan from Ellington Field to Johnson Space Center,” Witherspoon said. “Now we have a police escort while we’re doing that, just in case there may be traffic, but we’re landing and moving before rush hour starts in Houston.”
Upon arriving at Constructing 31 — the identical facility that houses nearly all of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts in addition to other astromaterials collected by NASA missions — the OSIRIS-REx payload will likely be placed in a pair of cleanrooms.
“In the primary cleanroom, we take off one in all the layers of bagging, we clean all the pieces and we get it onto the nitrogen purge that’s within that lab. Then that is a protected place to go away the sample overnight if we want to,” Witherspoon said. “But then either we’ll proceed on that day or on Tuesday morning and move to the upstairs lab, which is known as the OSIRIS-REx Curation Lab and was specially built for this mission.”
The brand new curation laboratory has specialized gloveboxes for handling each the Bennu samples in addition to the hardware used to grab material from the asteroid’s surface and deliver it to Earth.
“Once the avionics deck goes into the glovebox, there may be one final step that Lockheed engineers do and that’s to open and take the lid off of the science canister, which then exposes the TAGSAM,” Witherspoon said. “We lift that off and put it right into a special fixture that curation gave us after which that’s after we are done. We back away, we leave the room and the NASA-led curation team is available in and starts the disassembly of all of the components.”
Sample study
NASA anticipates it is going to take several weeks from the purpose the lid is opened for the team to rigorously and methodically fully disassemble the hardware to disclose the pristine asteroid inside.
“Once that happens, we’ll begin to characterize the sample, understand higher what we have now, how much we have now and the way many various rock types and lithologies there is perhaps inside the sample,” Kevin Righter, NASA’s curator for the Bennu material, said during a pre-landing press briefing. “That characterization will likely be used to find out the fabric that we allocate to our international partners from JAXA [Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency] and the Canadian Space Agency, in addition to determining what material will likely be appropriate to allocate to the science team for his or her studies.”
It’s believed the Bennu sample will help us find out how our solar system and planets evolved. The returned material will help scientists investigate planet formation and the origin of organics which will have led to life on Earth, hence the “O” within the mission’s full name, “Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security–Regolith Explorer” (OSIRIS-REx).
“We consider that we’re bringing back representatives of the seeds of life that the asteroids delivered firstly of our planet, which led to this amazing biosphere, biological evolution and to us being here today to look back on that tremendous history to take into consideration where did we come from and where are we going,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission on the University of Arizona, Tucson.
NASA has scheduled a press conference for Oct. 11 to supply a primary have a look at the samples and the preliminary findings by its science team.