NASA’s OSIRIS-REx was so good at grabbing asteroid rocks that they’re overflowing
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft did its job a bit of too properly on Tuesday, when it tried to scoop up a handful of rocks from an asteroid named Bennu greater than 200 million miles from Earth. The car really grabbed an excessive amount of materials with its robotic arm, jamming the lid at the top of the arm open — and letting a part of the asteroid pattern escape out into house.
“We were almost a victim of our own success here,” stated Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission at the University of Arizona, in a press convention.
OSIRIS-REx’s mission is to carry a pattern of asteroid materials again to Earth so that scientists can research the rocks in a lab. But as a result of OSIRIS-REx bit off greater than it might chew, its mission group is racing to stow the pattern contained in the spacecraft’s stomach, so the car doesn’t lose an excessive amount of materials to the void. “Time is of the essence, and no, we won’t sleep,” stated Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s affiliate administrator for science, in a press convention.
The good information is that OSIRIS-REx appears to have grabbed an ample and various group of asteroid rocks. The group’s objective was to snag as much as 60 grams (2.1 ounces) of rocks from Bennu’s floor, and pictures from the spacecraft present that OSIRIS-REx probably grabbed as much as 400 grams (14.1 ounces) of fabric, in line with the mission group. The pattern consists of rocks that vary in dimension, and a few are so massive that they prevented the spacecraft from sealing the pattern shut.
The engineers are assured that the rocks aren’t escaping too shortly, so the spacecraft ought to be capable of retailer a good quantity contained in the spacecraft earlier than an excessive amount of is depleted. They assume that they misplaced between 1 to 10 grams of fabric yesterday, after transferring the robotic arm round. However, NASA doesn’t plan to stow the pattern inside OSIRIS-REx till Monday. The mission group has to take time to determine all of the instructions for the spacecraft and guarantee that this course of will nonetheless work with rocks spilling out into house. It’s unclear how a lot of the pattern can be misplaced as they wait.
There’s one other complication, too: simply transferring the robotic arm round with the pattern inside causes rocks to flee outward, so stowing the supplies dangers dropping extra pebbles. The engineers assume they could lose as much as 10 extra grams of rocks simply by stowing the pattern contained in the spacecraft. But it’s higher to stow one thing than to attend for all the things to leak out.
To seize the pattern from Bennu, OSIRIS-REx is provided with a robotic arm that has a cylindrical pattern collector at the top. On Tuesday afternoon, OSIRIS-REx slowly approached Bennu and gently tapped its floor with the collector. At the second of contact, the collector puffed out a bunch of nitrogen gasoline, shaking up all of the rocks and pebbles on the asteroid’s floor. Some of these rocks shot up contained in the collector, whereas others danced and twirled out into house.
The OSIRIS-REx group couldn’t inform immediately if it had a pattern or not, as they needed to wait to get photographs from the spacecraft. But they quickly knew that they had an issue after they lastly obtained an up-close image of the pattern collector. The footage present that a part of the lid is jammed open by a centimeter; tiny items of asteroid will be seen hovering across the arm.
If the pattern seize had gone extra easily, NASA would have waited a short time longer to stow the fabric inside OSIRIS-REx. In reality, the mission group had deliberate to do a spin maneuver on Saturday with the spacecraft, twirling the car up with its robotic arm outstretched. This would have helped the group determine simply how a lot materials the spacecraft had collected. The engineers might measure the spacecraft’s inertia, evaluating it to a time earlier than when the spacecraft didn’t have a pattern in its arm. But the spin is successfully canceled. “It would risk loss of material so that is not a prudent path to go down,” Lauretta stated.
That means the OSIRIS-REx group gained’t really know the way a lot pattern is within the spacecraft’s stomach because the car returns again to Earth. “I think we’re going to have to wait till we get home to know precisely how much we have and that, as you can imagine — that’s hard,” Lauretta stated. “We were looking forward to a sample mass measurement.” So it’s attainable that the entire pattern might fall out earlier than Monday, and we wouldn’t really know till the spacecraft comes again to our planet.
The OSIRIS-REx group additionally doesn’t plan to seize one other pattern from Bennu, so that is it. That’s why engineers are working shortly to retailer this pattern on Monday. “I am highly confident that it was successful — that we have more than the 60 grams of material that we promised Thomas and the agency that we would deliver,” Lauretta stated, including, “the most important thing is to get the sample safely stowed and minimize any more loss.”