Today from Cape Canaveral into space to probe OSIRIS-REx.
After years of heavy construction and months of endurance testing the spacecraft OSIRIS-Rex space Agency NASA, designed to catch the asteroids and shipping the samples of their soil is completely ready and will be going to space this Thursday from Cape Canaveral (USA). After the apparatus on Board the carrier rocket “Atlas V” will leave the earth’s atmosphere, it will have a long two-year journey toward its goal of near-earth asteroid Bennu.
By 2018, when OSIRIS reaches its destination, the device will start conducting its multi-year mission mapping the 500-meter asteroid and collecting samples of soil, the age of which, according to the guesses of scientists, is not less than 4.5 billion years. Scientists believe that within this ancient space rock may contain the building blocks of life, one of those by which we all exist on this planet called Earth.
Unlike the long-suffering lander Philae of the European space Agency, the camera OSIRIS-Rex will not perform a hard landing on the asteroid Bennu. In 2020, after studying the asteroid’s surface, NASA will begin a very slow convergence with the target. Special machine engines, developed by Lockheed Martin, allow him to gently bounce off the asteroid, while the scientific instruments of the apparatus by means of powerful jets of hydrogen will literally knock out the asteroid’s surface the samples.
NASA hopes that this technology will be able to collect from a few grams to several kilograms of samples, the spacecraft will return to Earth. In 2023, OSIRIS-Rex will reset the collected samples in a special parachute capsule, which will land in the desert of Utah.
