(Source: The Salt Lake Tribune, Francisco Kjolseth.) On July 20, 2023, members of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission discussed their intention to return a near-Earth asteroid Bennu’s pattern to Utah. Examine and Coach Vary in a truck-sized capsule later this autumn. The capsule shown in the photo will open its parachute before crew members move it to a clean room on the site. Dugway: This autumn, on a morning when the sun rises above the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains, the NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx will launch a capsule that it has been carrying around for the last seven years toward Earth. Utah is where it vacations.
Little more than the size of a truck tire, the capsule is carrying what NASA officials believe to be the first American pattern recovered from an asteroid’s surface. The capsule will enter Earth’s atmosphere somewhere off the coast of California and then rocket eastward toward Utah’s northwest desert. According to NASA officials, the mission lasted more than two years and may have covered 200 million miles from the surface of the asteroid Bennu.
On the morning of September 24, the capsule and asteroid pattern will make a soft landing in the sand and brush of the army coaching range of Dugway Proving Floor if a drogue parachute, which is utilized as a brake to slow the capsule down, and afterward a 24-foot main chute deploy.
According to NASA officials, the whole process will take 13 minutes, give or take 60 seconds.
NASA officials told the Utah media on Thursday that after almost twenty years of preparation and seven years of out-and-back house travel, they would only be able to determine if the mission was worthwhile after these last 780 seconds—an asteroid pattern delivered to the Utah desert.
Returns of OSIRIS-REx
Researchers must study Bennu in order to better understand the universe’s beginnings of life, according to Lockheed Martin’s lead floor repair engineer on the OSIRIS-REx mission, Richard Witherspoon. “We’re trying to figure out how amino acids, which are the building blocks of life, ended up here on Earth,” Witherspoon said. She speculated that asteroids like Bennu may have brought these building blocks—as well as water—to Earth.
(Source: The Salt Lake Tribune, Francisco Kjolseth.) On Thursday, July 20, 2023, College of Arizona Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta will join NASA OSIRIS-REx mission participants to discuss their intention to return a pattern of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu to the Utah Examine and Coach Vary later in the autumn. According to NASA officials, Bennu is thought to be around 4.5 billion years old, which makes it somewhat older than the planet where Thursday’s press conference was held. Bennu is also thought to contain remnants of the solar system that may provide insight into its design.
“We have to understand what happened to us and how we got to be here,” said Dante Lauretta, a College of Arizona professor of cosmochemistry and planetary science. Principal investigator Lauretta works on the OSIRIS-REx mission. But we also need to understand how common it is throughout the galaxy and, ultimately, how often it is for the genesis of life to occur, he said.
OSIRIS-REx spacecraft—short
Launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 8, 2016, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft—short for Origins Spectral Interpretation Useful Resource Identification Safety-Regolith Explorer—reached Bennu in 2018. In order to collect a pattern of dirt and tiny boulders, the 20-foot-long spacecraft made a short landing on Bennu’s floor on October 20, 2020, after studying the asteroid and providing NASA scientists with the opportunity to examine it from a distance. After putting these provisions into OSIRIS-REx, the house traveler set off on its protracted voyage home.
But OSIRIS-REx will never really return to the Earth’s surface; instead, it will be given a new, observation-only asteroid mission as soon as it returns to Earth with the Bennu pattern capsule.
An 11-person floor repair crew will travel across Utah by helicopter as soon as the capsule, known to mission members as the Pattern Return Capsule, or SRC, lands down. Examine and Coach Vary (UTTR) in order to get the pattern. According to Witherspoon, those staff members come from UTTR, Lockheed Martin, the College of Arizona, and NASA.
They will have two hours to retrieve the capsule, pack it for further transit inside the army setup, and collect water and soil samples from the area around its landing site. Later, after scientists begin analyzing the components of the asteroid, these ambient samples will serve as controls. After that, the capsule will be transported to a temporary “clear room” built inside a hangar at Dugway using a cable—or, as the army would say, sling loaded. After cleaning the capsule and assembling the Bennu pattern, experts will move it to NASA’s Johnston Area Middle in Houston, Texas.
Although NASA built their own clean room on the setup, Dugway has a history of testing the army’s defense against chemical and biological threats, as well as decontaminating equipment and army personnel. The company’s main fear, according to Nicole Lunning, a NASA curation lead who may be confined in the clean room to help package handle the sample for shipping to Houston, is natural contamination. She said that NASA has already started gathering management samples from the clean chamber.
Lunning said, “We’ll try this again in a couple of instances before the pattern returns.” “And that does actually give us the flexibility to make sure that, as we introduce the pattern into cleaner and cleaner services, starting with this one and the labs at Johnson Area Middle, we’re protecting it as well as we will.”
The pattern is being sent to Utah by NASA; why?
Should Utah residents be worried about the capsule coming down to Earth? Because of the electricity and housing offered by Dugway and the vast, dry desert that borders the northwest of Beehive State, NASA officials believe that Utah is the ideal location for landing it.
(Source: The Salt Lake Tribune, Francisco Kjolseth.) Curation Initiatives Lead Kimberly Allums speaks with several NASA OSIRIS-REx mission participants about the clear chamber that will serve as the first step of restoration on Thursday, July 20, 2023, when a capsule lands on the Utah coast later this autumn. View and Coach Vary grasp a pattern from the asteroid Bennu, which is close to Earth. According to NASA’s deputy mission supervisor for OSIRIS-REx, Mike Moreau, even when errors in wind and air density are taken into account, predictions of the SRC landing zone still stay within the UTTR bounds.
“That’s actually one of the many most important reasons we picked this location,” Moreau said.
Furthermore, this is not the first time NASA has made a pattern container landing in Utah. According to Witherspoon, samples from the Genesis and Stardust missions touched down at UTTR.
Are NASA scientists worried that the lucrative home mission may turn into a science fiction movie where humans are harmed by chemicals or organic stuff, even if the blueprint arrives safely inside UTTR?
The police claim they make lighthearted jokes about the possibility, but they also say they’re certain that the likelihood has been eliminated by their remote testing over the last seven years. They claim that contamination of the Earth might jeopardize the almost ten-year scientific mission, which is the real worry.
“We’ll see,” someone joked.
(Source: The Salt Lake Tribune, Francisco Kjolseth.) On July 20, 2023, members of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission discussed their intention to return a near-Earth asteroid Bennu’s pattern to Utah. Examine and Coach Vary later in the autumn.