Illustration of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft landing on Asteroid Bennu. (Photo: NASA / Goddard / University of Arizona / Fox News)
AIRCRAFT space NASA's OSIRIS-REx will make a historic landing on asteroid Bennu this Tuesday. They plan to take samples of space rock that will be brought back to Earth and researched.
NASA states that the OSIRIS-REx mission will help unlock the secrets of the Solar System. "Asteroids are the remains of the building blocks that make up the planets in our solar system, and may allow life on Earth," NASA explained in a statement, as quoted by Fox News , Tuesday (20/10/2020).
The mission will also provide information that can help protect Planet Earth from a possible collision with the Asteroid Bennu.
Bennu, which has a height like the Empire State Building, according to NASA, has the potential to threaten the Earth in the next century. "Bennu has a 1: 2700 chance of affecting Earth in the late 2100s, but this mission will also help us learn more about protecting ourselves if necessary," NASA explained through its official website.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft itself is targeting the relatively flat center of the Asteroid Bennu from a tennis court-sized crater called Nightingale. Boulders as big as buildings rose above the targeted landing zone.
The OSIRIS-REx landing is scheduled to take place today, Tuesday, October 20, 2020, at around 6:12 p.m. EDT. This spacecraft will use a robotic arm to take samples from the Bennu Asteroid which is approximately 200 million miles from Planet Earth.
Contact should last 5 to 10 seconds, long enough to shoot out pressurized nitrogen gas and suck up churning dirt and gravel.
The OSIRIS-REx aircraft will also operate autonomously during an unprecedented "touch and go" maneuver. The aircraft can retry sampling if the first attempt is unsuccessful.
OSIRIS-REx which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer was launched in September 2016 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The spacecraft first reached Asteroid Bennu in December 2018.
The aircraft is scheduled to return to the Bennu asteroid next year and will send asteroid samples to Earth on September 24, 2023.
NASA recently revealed that parts of another asteroid, Vesta, had been spotted on Bennu's surface.
In April 2019, the Japanese Hayabusa 2 spacecraft successfully "bombed" the Ryugu asteroid in the name of scientific research. He briefly landed on Ryugu and fired a scientific research "bullet" into the space rock.
Hantoro, Journalist