A precious bounty of asteroid samples is ready to reach on Earth this weekend, and scientists all over the world cannot wait.
Early on Sunday morning (Sept. 24), NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe will release a capsule containing about 8.8 ounces (250 grams) of fabric collected from a 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid named Bennu. If all goes in keeping with plan, the capsule will land within the desert of northern Utah that day at 10:54 a.m. EDT (1454 GMT).
However the sample’s travels won’t end there.
In Utah, a recovery team will take the capsule apart, remove the canister containing the Bennu material and prepare the sample for transport. Such work should take a few day, in keeping with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return press kit.
On Monday (Sept. 25) or thereabouts, the sample might be loaded on a plane and flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. The asteroid dirt and gravel will then make its solution to a newly built curation facility managed by the agency’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division.
ARES “is home to the world’s most extensive collection of extraterrestrial materials — including lunar rocks, solar wind particles, meteorites, cosmic dust, and comet samples,” NASA officials wrote within the press kit.
The OSIRIS-REx science team will then spend two years studying the sample and conducting analyses needed to fulfill the $1 billion mission’s chief research goals. Those goals include shedding further light on the solar system’s early days and mapping out the role carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu can have played in delivering the constructing blocks of life to Earth way back.
The team consists of greater than 200 people based at 35 institutions all over the world. NASA officials have said these researchers may have access to about 25% of the Bennu material.
The Canadian Space Agency will get 4% of the sample, in return for contributing OSIRIS-REx’s laser altimeter instrument. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will get 0.5%, as a part of a partnership with NASA that features collaboration between OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2 asteroid sample-return mission.
Hayabusa2 returned about 0.2 ounces (5 g) of the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in December 2020. NASA got 10% of that sample. (Despite the lower percentage, JAXA’s Bennu haul will likely be larger than NASA’s Ryugu allocation, given how much material OSIRIS-REx collected.)
NASA will keep the remaining 70% of the Bennu sample at JSC, preserving it “for study by scientists not yet born, using technologies not yet invented, to reply fundamental questions on the solar system,” the press kit states.
The agency employed this same approach with moon material brought home by the Apollo astronauts from 1969 to 1972. Scientists proceed studying the Apollo material today, steadily revealing recent insights concerning the moon and its history.
NASA also made some Apollo moon rocks available to museums, allowing regular folks to get a close-up have a look at off-Earth stuff. The agency will almost actually do the identical with the OSIRIS-REx material, so expect some announcements on that front over the subsequent few years.