Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA is almost ready to touch down on asteroid Bennu and grab a sample

By
Add as a preferred source on Google
OSIRIS-REx Cruises Over Site Nightingale During Final Dress Rehearsal

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been investigating asteroid Bennu since it arrived there in 2018, sharing pictures of the distant body. But the craft didn’t just travel there to snap photos — it will also touch down onto the surface of the asteroid and take a sample to be returned to Earth.

Recommended Videos

This week, OSIRIS-REx performed its final practice run ahead of its planned touchdown. The rehearsal took four hours, during which NASA engineers checked that the spacecraft could perform its functions as intended, checking its orbit departure burn, the “Checkpoint” burn during which autonomous systems check the craft’s position and speed and adjust as needed to bring it into line with the asteroid, and the “Matchpoint” burn during which the craft matches the asteroid’s speed so it can touch down accurately and safely.

As part of the rehearsal, OSIRIS-REx also deployed its sampling arm, called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), which it will use to scoop up a sample of rock and dust from the asteroid’s surface.

This artist's rendering shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collecting a sample from the asteroid Bennu using a mechanical arm to touch the asteroid's surface.
This artist’s rendering shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collecting a sample from the asteroid Bennu using a mechanical arm to touch the asteroid’s surface. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

“Many important systems were exercised during this rehearsal — from communications, spacecraft thrusters, and most importantly, the onboard Natural Feature Tracking guidance system and hazard map,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement. “Now that we’ve completed this milestone, we are confident in finalizing the procedures for the TAG [touch and go] event. This rehearsal confirmed that the team and all of the spacecraft’s systems are ready to collect a sample in October.”

While it was rehearsing, the spacecraft was also able to gather some science data including images of the asteroid and spectrometry observations. You can see some of the data captured in the video at the top of the page, which shows images taken by OSIRIS-REx’s SamCam camera as the spacecraft approached the asteroid’s surface. The images were taken over a period of less than 15 minutes, and during the rehearsal, the craft came within just 131 feet of the asteroid’s surface.

With everything working and the rehearsal deemed a success, OSIRIS-REx is ready to touch down on the asteroid and grab a sample on October 20, 2020. It will then return this sample to Earth for study, arriving on 24 September, 2023.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Former Space Writer
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Topics
Lightsails have hit another speed bump on the road to interstellar travel
The coolest interstellar travel idea may get betrayed by the light pushing it
LightSail in Earth orbit

Laser-powered lightsails are one of the coolest answers to spaceflight. It might not be as sci-fi-sounding as a warp drive, but now, its practicality has also come under question. Using lightsails, a spacecraft could unfurl an ultra-thin reflective sail and let a powerful laser push it toward another star, without relying on fuel.

The tech was simple and elegant--except it's also more complicated than it sounds. A new preprint from researchers Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology suggests that relativistic lightsails may run into a hidden propulsion problem once they start moving extremely fast.

Read more
The galaxy has an exoplanet size mystery, and NASA’s EVE mission wants to solve it
This planet-hunting mission wants to catch baby worlds before they grow up
Artist’s Illustration of Exoplanets Orbiting Barnard’s Star

Mankind venturing into space ended up creating more questions than it answered, and one of the dilemmas is related to the planet sizes. Astronomers have found plenty of rocky super-Earths and plenty of puffier sub-Neptunes, but far fewer planets with a radius of about 1.8 times Earth’s.

That gap is known as the radius valley, and a proposed mission called the Early eVolution Explorer, or EVE, wants to figure out why it exists. NASA has a simple plan: look at planets while they are still young. The mission concept, detailed in a new arXiv preprint and covered by Phys.org, would focus on newly formed star clusters to see what small planets look like before billions of years of evolution.

Read more
We just got a hot signal that a Tesla and SpaceX merger could happen, after all
Tesla

For years, the idea of Tesla and SpaceX becoming a single company has lived somewhere between ambitious business theory and Elon Musk fan fiction. The two companies already share DNA, leadership influence, engineering talent, and long-term goals. But every time the topic surfaced, it felt more like an interesting thought experiment than a realistic possibility. Now, one of the most important people at SpaceX has added fresh fuel to the conversation.

Speaking in a recent CNBC interview, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell was asked about the possibility of closer ties between Tesla and SpaceX. Her response wasn’t a flat-out denial. In fact, she suggested that bringing the two companies together could make life a little easier for Musk. That may sound like an offhand comment, but coming from Shotwell, it’s noteworthy. She’s been at SpaceX since its earliest days and remains one of the company's most influential executives.

Read more