Scientists at NASA are putting the finishing touches on a spacecraft specially designed to rendezvous with Asteroid Bennu in 2018. The mission is to find clues about the origins of life on Earth.
"We are days away from encapsulating into our rocket faring and lifting this spacecraft on to the Atlas V vehicle and beginning the journey to Bennu and back," Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the mission told Reuters at the Kennedy Space Center.
The $1 billion mission, known as OSIRIS-REx, is scheduled for launch on September 8, 2016 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The solar-powered robotic spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin (LMT), is set to rendezvous with asteroid 1999 RQ36, nicknamed Bennu, in a two-year time frame, for mapping and surveys. The spacecraft will then use a robotic arm to collect samples and return back to Earth in 2023.
Scientists are interested in studying the minerals and chemicals contained in the asteroid. Similar asteroids crashing into Earth are believed to have provided organic materials and water, the building blocks needed for life on Earth.
“We expect to find materials that pre-date our solar system," said Lauretta, adding that physical samples from the 1960s and 1970s Apollo moon missions are still bearing scientific fruit to this day.
"To understand the chemistry down to the molecular level we have to get a sample back and take them to the best labs in this country and around the world now and for generations to come," added mission project scientist Jason Dworkin.
In 2010, Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft was the first to bring back physical samples of an asteroid to Earth.
Along with sample retrieval, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is equipped with a suite of cameras and sensors that are designed to study the forces that influence the asteroids orbit. Even planning the spacecraft's flight plan for a rendezvous with Bennu was difficult because the physics of asteroid trajectories isn't a perfect science, said Lauretta.
"This turned out to be a much larger challenge than we originally anticipated because other forces like solar radiation pressure and even the thermal emission of the asteroid itself will push the spacecraft around," Lauretta added.
The mission, Dworkin said, will give astronomers new insights into how heat from the Sun influences the movement of space rocks. The data is critical in protecting Earth from potential asteroid collisions in future.
