The POT successfully rehearsed this Wednesday the landing of a capsule from the OSIRIS-REx mission, which will contain the samples collected in the asteroid Bennu and will for the first time provide the space program with USA material from such bodies.
The OSIRIS-REx mission team made a test landing in the Utah desert in preparation for the mission’s arrival on September 24, NASA experts explained in a virtual press conference.
The test capsule was launched from a helicopter and landed in a designated area at a Department of Defense training center in the desert near Salt Lake City, Utah, NASA reported.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft took off towards the asteroid Bennu in 2016, recalled Melissa Morris, director of this space program.
“OSIRIS-Rex arrived at Bennu in 2018, where it began an 18-month study on the surface of the asteroid to choose a site to collect the sample”recounted.
Two years later, in October 2020, the spacecraft began its return trip to Earth, which will culminate in three weeks, when it drops the capsule with the samples over the Utah desert.
“This is the first US mission to return samples collected from an asteroid that is beyond the orbit of the Moon,” stressed the expert.
Landing the capsule will not be easy. According to Richard Burns, another of the mission leaders, the team will make the decision to release the capsule when the ship is 10.7826 kilometers from Earth.
“The landing area measures about 400 square meters. It’s like throwing a dart across a basketball court and hoping it hits the center of a bull’s-eye.”Burns noted.
Once the samples collected by OSIRIS-REx are in the hands of scientists on Earth, NASA explained in a statement, they will be studied for “decades” in order to analyze how the Earth and the solar system formed. like the origin of the organic elements that led to the formation of life on our planet.
The asteroid Bennu, which was discovered in 1999, has a width of half a kilometer at its equator, is at an orbital distance from the Sun of 168 million kilometers and every six years it approaches the Earth.
Source: EFE
Source: Gestion
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