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Journalism of Courage
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) rehearsed part of a mission where it recovered a sample return capsule from the location where actual samples of the asteroid Bennu are scheduled to land on September 24 this year.
Teams from NASA have already rehearsed many parts of the recovery operation over the year but this is the most realistic rehearsal yet, says the space agency. It included helicopter training for the team members who will fly by helicopter to retrieve the sample capsule from its landing site.
The mission has spent seven long years in space and it is about to face one if its biggest challenges yet—delivering the asteroid sample it collected while making sure it is protected from heat, vibrations and any contaminations from our planet.
Instead of landing on Earth, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will “drop” a capsule containing the sample. To do this accurately, the spacecraft will have to enter our planet at a precise speed in the right direction.
If the capsule is angled too high during the drop, it will “skip” off the atmosphere like a rock skipping across a river. Except, the “rock” in this scenario, the sample capsule will end up drifting in outer space. On the other hand, if it is angled too low, it will burn up in our planet’s atmosphere.
Asteroids can preserve chemical signatures from a long time ago when the universe was a younger place. This means that they can potentially act as “time capsules” for the earliest history of our solar system. In fact, there is even a possibility that they contain samples of the ancient building blocks of life.
