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

NASA’s first asteroid-sampling mission continues on to a new target

By

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft recently dropped off precious cargo — sending a sample it collected from asteroid Bennu tumbling through Earth’s atmosphere to land in the Utah desert. A team quickly scooped up the sample and took it for analysis, enjoying the bounty of the largest-ever sample collected from an asteroid.

But the spacecraft didn’t land on Earth along with the sample. Rather, it released the sample as it passed by Earth and continued its journey. Though the spacecraft only had the ability to collect one sample, it still has a whole suite of scientific instruments on board. So rather than letting that go to waste, the spacecraft will now be traveling on to investigate another asteroid. Its new mission is also marked with a new name: the spacecraft is now OSIRIS-APEX.

OSIRIS-APEX pursues asteroid Apophis during its exceptionally close flyby of Earth on April 13, 2029.
OSIRIS-APEX pursues asteroid Apophis during its exceptionally close flyby of Earth on April 13, 2029. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

The spacecraft will now travel to visit asteroid Apophis, which is famous as a near-Earth asteroid that was once thought to be in danger of impacting planet Earth. More recent measurements have shown that we aren’t in danger of an impact any time soon, but the asteroid will still be passing close to our planet.

Recommended Videos

“Apophis is an infamous asteroid,” said new principal investigator for the OSIRIS-APEX mission, Dani DellaGiustina of the University of Arizona, in a statement. “When it was discovered in 2004, there was a scare that it was going to impact the Earth in 2029, but that risk was retired. Then there was another scare that it was going to impact the Earth exactly seven years later, in 2036, but observations combined with modeling now show that Apophis doesn’t pose a risk for at least the next one hundred years. Despite this, Apophis still has this role in the psyche of all of us who study these things. While it’s not going to impact the Earth in 2029, however, it does get very close.”

Related

OSIRIS-APEX will meet up with Apophis during the period when it will come within 20,000 miles of Earth in April 2029. The asteroid is around 340 meters wide, and asteroids of this size only come this close to Earth around once every 7,500 years. It is thought to be an S-type asteroid, meaning it is made of silicate or stony materials, like the asteroid Bennu. The researchers want to learn about how strong and dense the asteroid is, which is important both for future planetary defense planning and for understanding how asteroids were created and evolve.

By combining data on Bennu and Apophis, researchers can learn more about asteroids that might threaten Earth one day. “We learned a lot at Bennu, but now we’re armed with even more questions,” said Amy Simon, OSIRIS-APEX mission project scientist.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Hubble discovers over 1,000 new asteroids thanks to photobombing
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it. In reality it is a combination of time exposures of a foreground asteroid moving through Hubble’s field of view, photobombing the observation of the galaxy. Several exposures of the galaxy were taken, which is evidenced by the dashed pattern.

The Hubble Space Telescope is most famous for taking images of far-off galaxies, but it is also useful for studying objects right here in our own solar system. Recently, researchers have gotten creative and found a way to use Hubble data to detect previously unknown asteroids that are mostly located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The researchers discovered an incredible 1,031 new asteroids, many of them small and difficult to detect with several hundred of them less than a kilometer in size. To identify the asteroids, the researchers combed through a total of 37,000 Hubble images taken over a 19-year time period, identifying the tell-tale trail of asteroids zipping past Hubble's camera.

Read more
NASA needs a new approach for its challenging Mars Sample Return mission
An illustration of NASA's Sample Return Lander shows it tossing a rocket in the air like a toy from the surface of Mars.

NASA has shared an update on its beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission, admitting that its previous plan was too ambitious and announcing that it will now be looking for new ideas to make the mission happen. The idea is to send a mission to collect samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for study. It's been a long-term goal of planetary science researchers, but one that is proving costly and difficult to put into practice.

The Perseverance rover has already collected and sealed a number of samples of Mars rock as it journeys around the Jezero Crater, and has left these samples in a sample cache ready to be collected.  However, getting them back to Earth in the previous plan required sending a vehicle to Mars, getting it to land on the surface, sending out another rover to collect the samples and bring them back, launching a rocket from the planet's surface (something which has never been done before), and then having this rocket rendezvous with another spacecraft to carry them back to Earth. That level of complexity was just too much to be feasible within a reasonable budget, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced this week.

Read more
These 3 companies are developing NASA’s new moon vehicle
An artist’s concept design of NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle.

NASA has big plans for the moon -- not only sending people back to the moon for the first time in over 50 years but also having them investigate the exciting south pole region, where water is thought to be available. The plan is not just for astronauts to visit for a day or two, but to have them stay on the moon for weeks at a time, exploring the surrounding area. And to explore, they can't just travel on foot -- they'll need a new moon buggy.

Today, Wednesday, April 3, NASA announced the three companies developing its new lunar vehicle: Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab. They'll each develop a lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) that can carry astronauts from their landing site across the moon's surface, allowing them to range further and reach more areas of interest.

Read more