Watch as NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission brings asteroid samples back to Earth

The NASA spacecraft that snatched a sample of rocks from the distant Bennu asteroid last year fired up a suite of thrusters on Monday and committed to its two-year journey back home. The maneuver kicks the minivan-sized spacecraft, dubbed Osiris-REx, onto a winding cosmic path around the Sun and toward Earth’s orbit. When it returns to Earth in 2023, it’ll toss a capsule packed with asteroid samples through the atmosphere somewhere over Utah.

The spacecraft’s Asteroid Departure Maneuver (ADM) was no sweat for the Osiris-REx team, but it marked a significant step towards the return of the first pristine cache of asteroid samples in NASA’s history. Spacecraft engineers inside a Lockheed Martin center in Littleton, Colorado confirmed the seven-minute thruster firing began at 4PM ET Monday and celebrated success shortly after.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has successfully stored a small cache of rocks that it grabbed from the surface of an asteroid named Bennu last week, sealing the pebbles inside the vehicle’s belly. The asteroid particles will now remain inside the spacecraft over the next three years, as OSIRIS-REx makes its way back to Earth.

OSIRIS-REx grabbed the sample on October 20th of last week, more than four years after launching from Earth on its mission to touch an asteroid. Using a thin robotic arm, the vehicle lightly tapped the asteroid Bennu, stirring up rocks on the surface and pushing some of the pebbles up into the spacecraft.

NASA shared astonishing images of its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touching an asteroid yesterday, revealing how the vehicle stirred up rocks and debris on the object’s surface when it made contact. The goal of the tap was to collect a sample of material from the asteroid, but the engineers behind the spacecraft say they won’t for sure if they collected anything until this weekend, when they spin the vehicle and measure how much material is inside.

However, the OSIRIS-REx team feels confident that they got something. “Bottom line is from analysis of the images that we’ve gotten down so far, is that the sampling event went really well, as good as we could have imagined it would,” Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, said during a press conference. “And I think the chances that there’s material inside… have gone way up way up based on the analysis of the images.”

This afternoon, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will grab a small sample of rocks from the surface of an asteroid named Bennu zooming through space more than 200 million miles from Earth. It’s an ambitious task, but if it works, OSIRIS-REx may eventually return to Earth with the largest sample of material from another space body since NASA’s Apollo missions to the Moon.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been circling Bennu for the last two years, mapping its surface and hunting for the right spot to snag these rocks. After an intense amount of planning from the mission team, the engineers have a target all picked out on Bennu and are ready to send their spacecraft down to the surface. OSIRIS-REx will lightly touch the surface of Bennu with an extended robotic arm, which will then blast air onto the rocks and stir things up. The blast should send pebbles and dust up into the arm. The rubble will then be stored inside the spacecraft for the long journey home.

Tomorrow, a US spacecraft more than 200 million miles from Earth will sneak up to an asteroid larger than the Empire State Building and snag a handful of rocks from its surface. If all goes to plan, the spacecraft will store the precious cache of rocks inside its belly, and will eventually transport the materials to Earth, where they can be studied by scientists in a lab.

The spacecraft stealing these rocks is called OSIRIS-REx, part of the first-ever NASA mission tasked with returning samples of an asteroid back to Earth. Launched in September of 2016, OSIRIS-REx spent two years traveling to an asteroid named Bennu. Since it arrived in 2018, the spacecraft has been circling the asteroid and mapping it in excruciating detail, in order to find just the right spot to scoop up a sample.

Next year, NASA plans to scoop up a small batch of dirt from an asteroid named Bennu, located millions of miles from Earth — and now the agency knows which part of the space rock it’s going to steal from. Today, the space agency announced that one of its spacecraft will attempt to grab some particles from a 20-meter-wide crater, called Nightingale, on the asteroid.

Engineers picked the Nightingale site from four final candidate spots on Bennu, arguing it could be the best place to find organic material and water on the asteroid that may hail from the earliest days of the Solar System. “This one really came out on top, because of the scientific value,” Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the asteroid sampling mission, said during a press conference announcing the selection. However, targeting the crater is not without risk. The area is surrounded by a large wall of rocks, which could make it difficult to grab a sample. But ultimately, Lauretta said the area could have what they’re looking for.

NASA’s asteroid-sampling spacecraft OSIRIS-REx just snapped its closest picture yet of Bennu, the deep-space rock it’s been hovering around since the end of last year. The high-resolution image highlights the object’s very rocky surface and even showcases a very large boulder on its southern half.

OSIRIS-REx took this up-close picture on June 13th, right after the spacecraft inserted itself into orbit around Bennu for the second time. The vehicle first got into Bennu’s orbit on December 31st, 2018, flying about a mile away from the asteroid’s surface. From that path, OSIRIS-REx mapped Bennu’s surface in intricate detail, and also observed some interesting things from this vantage point, including rocks spewing from Bennu’s surface.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made an astonishing discovery about the asteroid it has been orbiting since December: the rock is actively spewing material out into space. The asteroid, named Bennu, has ejected materials up to 11 times since the spacecraft has been there. But no one is sure what exactly is causing these bursts.

The revelation is just one of many surprises that scientists have learned about Bennu, ever since OSISIR-REx reached the asteroid late last year. Launched in 2016, OSIRIS-REx is tasked with eventually grabbing a sample from Bennu and then returning it back to Earth, to help scientists better study asteroids — remnants of the early Solar System. But before that happens, the OSIRIS-REx mission team is trying to learn as much as it can about the asteroid using the spacecraft’s instruments.

Long before it struck out on its own, a distant, small asteroid called Bennu had a wet, watery start, according to new evidence just announced by NASA.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which arrived at Bennu on December 3rd after a two-year journey, is currently positioned about 12 miles above the surface of the asteroid. It recently sent back data indicating that the asteroid’s surface is littered with clay-like minerals that indicate that parts of this space rock had liquid water at some point in its distant past.

Today, one of NASA’s deep-space probes, OSIRIS-REx, arrived at the space rock it’s been traveling toward for the last two years, an asteroid named Bennu. At noon ET, OSIRIS-REx came within about 12 miles (20 kilometers) of the asteroid, which is closer than ever before. The arrival means that OSIRIS-REx is now starting a new phase of its mission that entails extensively mapping the surface of the asteroid to find the best place to grab a sample of material.

“We have arrived!” Javi Cerna, the OSIRIS-REx telecom engineer at Lockheed Martin, jubilantly proclaimed on NASA TV when the mission team received word that the spacecraft had made it to the asteroid. The announcement was followed by cheers and applause by the team members at the Denver headquarters of Lockheed Martin, the company that built the spacecraft.

NASA’s asteroid-sampling spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has captured its very first images of the deep-space target it’s currently hurtling toward — a nearly half-mile-wide space rock orbiting the Sun named Bennu. It’s a big step for the vehicle as it prepares for its arrival at the asteroid in December of this year.

Since the picture was taken from so far away — at a distance of 1.4 million miles — Bennu appears as just a few pixels of light moving across space. But for the OSIRIS-REx team, it shows that their spacecraft is on the right track and that Bennu is right where they expected. “Many of us have been working for years and years and years to get this first image down,” Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said during a press conference on Friday.

On Friday, a spacecraft the size of an SUV will slingshot around Earth’s South Pole, altering its trajectory through space. The probe is NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, and its upcoming maneuver around our planet is known as a gravity assist — a way to harness Earth’s gravity to alter its orbit. The move is critical, since it will put OSIRIS-REx on course to meet up with an asteroid in the fall of 2018.

OSIRIS-REx launched last year with a relatively straightforward purpose: grab a sample of rocks from an asteroid and bring them back to Earth. If all goes well, the vehicle should retrieve the largest sample ever collected from an asteroid, and give scientists the chance to study the space rock components in more detail than ever before. But first, the probe has to reach its target — a nearby asteroid named Bennu.

An Atlas V rocket just successfully launched NASA’s OSIRIS-REx vehicle into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, initiating the spacecraft’s journey to grab a sample from an asteroid and bring it back to Earth. The probe’s expedition isn’t exactly a short one, though. It will take OSIRIS-REx seven years to rendezvous with the asteroid, scoop up a small sample of materials off the space rock, and then return back to our planet. If all goes according to plan, it’ll be the first time NASA brings back pieces of an asteroid, allowing researchers to closely study the chemical makeup of Bennu in laboratories here on Earth.

OSIRIS-REx is now on its way into a heliocentric orbit. In two weeks, NASA will turn all the spacecraft’s instruments on to see if they’re working properly. Then it’s smooth sailing for OSIRIS-REx, as it spends the next year traveling around the Sun. The spacecraft will eventually swing back by Earth in September 2017 and use the planet’s gravity to change the plane of its orbit, putting it in the same plane as Bennu. Then it’s another year of traveling through space until OSIRIS-REx reaches the asteroid in August 2018.