NASA Probe Succeeds in Collecting Asteroid Rock Sample

This morning, Reuters reported that a NASA probe landed yesterday on the surface of the asteroid 101955 Bennu to grab a sample of the asteroid’s rocks. The collected rock sample dates back to the formation of our solar system.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that is manufactured by Lockheed Martin extended its 3.35 meters long gas pressure probe to a flat gravel spot near the north pole of 101955 Bennu and grabbed the rock sample. This rock sample is NASA’s first asteroid stone sample.

Estelle Church the Lockheed mission operator announced that the collecting of the rock sample was complete. She also confirmed that the spacecraft moved away from the asteroid immediately after grabbing the sample.

The collected samples will be sent today to the lab to be examined by the scientists and to determine whether the collected samples are enough to test the materials on the asteroid surface or the probe will need to collect another sample.

If the samples are proved to be enough, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will head back to Earth and it will reach the surface of the Earth in 2023. Also, Japan is the only country in the world that succeeded in achieving a similar mission.

The 101955 Bennu asteroid is about 100 million miles from the Earth and it is a mass of stones that looks like an oak tree. 101955 Bennu was formed on the early days of our solar system and scientists believe that it has some evidence of the origins of life on Earth.

The head of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft researches Dante Lauretta announced during a NASA live from the Lockheed mission support center that the everything wnet exactly how it was supposed to, that they overcome the asteroid’s challenges and that the spacecraft worked perfectly.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft mission was launched in 2016 from the Kennedy Space Center to 101955 Bennu. The spacecraft rotated in the asteroids orbit for about two years in preparation to the sample collecting.

The astronomy scientist Lucy Lim announced before the collecting of the sample that a lot of things could go wrong seeing as the spacecraft is the size of a small truck and the asteroid has a lot of rocks. So, the spacecraft has to maneuver between the rocks to collect the sample.

The asteroids are known to be the debris left from the formation of our solar system about 4.5 million years ago. And scientist believe that the asteroids crashed into the Earth in the early stages and provided it with the different minerals and water that are essential for life. Thus, the samples were collected to prove this.