This artist's rendering reveals OSIRIS-REx spacecraft descending towards asteroid Bennu to gather a pattern of the asteroid’s floor. NASA/Goddard/College of Arizona

Think about parallel parking a 15-passenger van into simply two to a few parking areas surrounded by two-story boulders. On Oct. 20, a College of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years within the making will try the astronomical equal greater than 200 million miles away.

A NASA mission referred to as OSIRIS-REx will quickly try to the touch the floor of an asteroid and gather free rubble.

OSIRIS-REx is america’ first asteroid pattern return mission, aiming to gather and carry a pristine, unaltered pattern from an asteroid again to Earth for scientific research. The spacecraft will try to the touch the floor of the asteroid Bennu, which is hurtling by way of area at 63,000 miles per hour. If all goes based on plan, the spacecraft will deploy an 11-foot-long robotic arm referred to as TAGSAM – Contact-and-Go Pattern Acquisition Mechanism – and spend about 10 seconds accumulating at the very least two ounces of free rubble from the asteroid. The spacecraft, monitored remotely by a crew of scientists and engineers, will then stow away the pattern and start its return to Earth, scheduled for 2023.

You may watch this pattern assortment “Contact-And-Go” maneuver Oct. 20 at 5 p.m. EDT/ 2 p.m. PDT on NASA Tv and the company’s web site.

As senior vice chairman for analysis and innovation at UArizona and a mechanical engineer with a protracted profession in area techniques engineering, I imagine this milestone for OSIRIS-REx captures completely the spirit of analysis and innovation, the cautious stability of problem-solving and perseverance, of impediment and alternative.

What Bennu can educate us

In 2004, Michael Drake, then head of the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory; his protégé, Dante Lauretta, then a UArizona assistant professor of planetary science; and specialists from Lockheed Martin and NASA mentioned the very earliest idea of the OSIRIS-REx mission and what it would obtain.

Asteroids are relics of the earliest supplies that shaped our photo voltaic system, and finding out such a pattern may enable scientists to reply elementary questions in regards to the origins of the photo voltaic system. Additional, Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid with potential threat of impacting the Earth within the late 2100s, so the mission is also exploring methods by which such a collision is likely to be averted.

Maybe, although, essentially the most formidable purpose of the OSIRIS-REx mission is useful resource identification – the “RI” in OSIRIS. This implies, basically, mapping the chemical properties of Bennu to study, amongst different issues, in regards to the potential for mining asteroids to supply rocket gas – a notion which, in 2004, was far forward of its time.

NASA chosen UArizona to guide the mission in 2011, with Drake on the helm. Lauretta, a first-generation school scholar and UArizona alumnus, took over when Drake died that 12 months and continues to guide OSIRIS-REx right now. He would unquestionably make his predecessor proud.

Whereas OSIRIS-REx is the primary NASA mission to try to gather a pattern from an asteroid, the scientific and technological information requisite of such a mission is the results of a long time of prior exploration. Within the early 1990s, NASA’s Galileo flew previous the asteroids Gaspra and Ida. NEAR Shoemaker was the primary human-made object to orbit and land on an asteroid. Earlier than heading for the dwarf planet Ceres in 2012, NASA’s Daybreak spacecraft orbited and mapped extensively the asteroid Vesta.

And maybe most importantly, in 2010, the Japanese counterpart of NASA, JAXA, returned to Earth a small quantity of mud from an asteroid by way of its Hayabusa spacecraft. Early final 12 months, JAXA’s Hayabusa 2 landed on and efficiently collected a pattern from the asteroid Ryugu. The spacecraft will return to Earth in December of this 12 months. It has been a privilege and an absolute delight to watch and study from the accomplishments of our colleagues in Japan.

OSIRIS-REx is a NASA mission to discover near-Earth asteroid Bennu and return a pattern to Earth.

Navigating the surprising

OSIRIS-REx launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sept. 8, 2016, and arrived at Bennu in December 2018. Within the months main as much as this second, its crew of scientists and engineers has remotely carried out two rehearsals, getting very close to to Bennu with out touching it.

When the OSIRIS-REx crew chosen Bennu as its goal, it suspected and hoped that the asteroid’s floor would look one thing like a sandy seashore. However the scientific course of – and nature itself – is stuffed with surprises, some difficult, all wondrous. Because the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft approached Bennu, its suite of high-resolution cameras beamed lots of of photographs of the asteroid again to Earth, revealing not a beachlike floor, however a rugged, boulder-strewn panorama.

This was not precisely within the plan.

The crew pored over these pictures for months, trying to find a web site each broad sufficient for a spacecraft the scale of a giant passenger van to the touch down and maneuver with out hitting a boulder and containing materials positive sufficient to offer free rubble to gather.

On Dec. 12, 2019, the OSIRIS-REx crew introduced the chosen touchdown web site: Nightingale. Nightingale is residence to a comparatively new crater the scale of a tennis courtroom. At its edge lies a boulder the scale of a two-story constructing. The crew, which incorporates lots of of school, researchers and college students from UArizona and a number of other accomplice establishments, affectionately refers to this boulder as “Mount Doom.”

In a single small part of Nightingale’s crater – the scale of just some parking areas – the crew recognized free rubble sufficiently small for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to seize and carry away.

This set of stereoscopic pictures gives a 3D view of the 170-foot (52-meter) boulder that juts from asteroid Bennu’s southern hemisphere and the rocky slopes that encompass it. The picture was created by stereo picture processing scientists Brian Could, who can also be the lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, and Claudia Manzoni.

NASA/Goddard/College of Arizona

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

Issues may go fallacious on Oct. 20.

Except for crashing into Mount Doom, different much less dramatic, extra possible dangers lurk. The TAGSAM collector head may land on a rock, perched at an angle, slightly than flush towards a flat floor of rubble, making its assortment far much less efficient. As a result of the collector head can accommodate particles solely the scale of a nickel or smaller, there’s additionally the danger of it being successfully “clogged” by one thing bigger. In uncharted territory, issues don’t at all times go based on plan.

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Nonetheless, we’re optimistic.

The age-old adage rings true: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We have already got gained a lot information from the OSIRIS-REx mission, and we’ll proceed exploring and drawback fixing with the identical daring dedication that has taken us to this point.

This picture reveals the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s sampling arm – referred to as the Contact-And-Go Pattern Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) – and asteroid Bennu throughout the mission’s checkpoint rehearsal.

NASA/Goddard/College of Arizona

Elizabeth Cantwell works for the College of Arizona as Chief Analysis Officer.