NASA Confident About It’s Osiris Rex Probe Mission
Washington: After reviewing the first pictures to come down from Nasa's Osiris-Rex probe following its bid to grab a sample from asteroid Bennu, Dante Lauretta said: “We really did kind of make a mess.”
Dust and grit flew in all directions but that was good news, enthused the University of Arizona professor.
"Everything that we can see from these initial images indicates sampling success. So in case you can't tell, I'm pretty excited."
The principal investigator's team now has to work out precisely how much material Osiris-Rex might have lifted from the surface of 500m-wide Bennu.
If it's a kilo or more, it would represent the biggest extra-terrestrial sample cache since the Apollo astronauts gathered rocks from the Moon some 50 years ago.
But even a smaller amount would still be a great prize.
Bennu is a very primitive object, with chemistry preserved from the dawn of the Solar System more than 4.5 billion years ago. As such, it can tell us a great deal about how the Sun and the planets came into being.
Osiris-Rex used what had been described as a "reverse vacuum cleaner" to acquire its clutch of "soil".
More properly called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or Tag-Sam, this device comprised a long boom with a ring-shaped collection chamber on the end.
The idea was to deliver a squirt of nitrogen when the Tag-Sam made contact with the asteroid.
The hope was this gas would stir up Bennu's fragmented surface, leading to a considerable number of rocky pieces getting trapped inside the collection chamber.
Osiris-Rex may have been in contact with Bennu for only six seconds before retreating, but the sampling ring was flat and stable, and even pressing into the soil slightly. This should have maximised the chances of retaining material.
Rich Burns, Nasa's project manager on the mission, lauded the way his team managed to put the probe in just the right place on Bennu - almost exactly at the centre of the targeted sampling zone.
"We're over 320 million km away from Earth at this point, and we touched this asteroid within a metre of where we intended to. So that's extraordinary and a real credit to our team," he told reporters.
On Thursday, engineers will command the spacecraft to take detailed pictures of the sampling ring to try to see what it contains.
And then on Saturday, they'll make Osiris-Rex spin itself around with the Tag-Sam outstretched. Any extra mass on board will change the level of torque required to turn the probe, compared with the level that was needed to perform the same rotation exercise prior to sample acquisition.
"We are expecting a final sample mass measurement report on Monday," explained Sandy Freund, the mission operations manager at Lockheed Martin, the company that manufactured Osiris-Rex.
It seems highly likely that Osiris-Rex has achieved its objective of taking at least 60g off Bennu. But if it hasn't, there are two more nitrogen bottles still aboard the probe to facilitate further sampling bids. And there's plenty of time, too.
The spacecraft is not scheduled to depart Bennu for Earth until April next year. A landing on Earth for any rock cache in this timeline would be late 2023.
