OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft touches down on asteroid Bennu

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is designed to do research and to bring back samples of rocks and dirt in the asteroid, Bennu. It is properly known as Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx). It was launched on 8 September 2016 and after spending 2 years in moving forward in the emptiness of space, it covered 200 million miles and reached the asteroid Bennu on 31 December 2018. The spacecraft then spent around two years surveying and orbiting the asteroid Bennu to find a perfect place for a touchdown.

After the close analysis of the planet, the team had chosen a small crater called “Nightingale” as its top choice as the site sports relatively fresh and fine-grained material that hasn't been exposed to the harsh deep-space environment for long. Finally, all that struggle had paid off when the spacecraft had a touchdown on Bennu yesterday. The probe "kissed" the asteroid for about 10 seconds with its sample-collecting mechanism which is affixed to the end of OSIRIS-REx's 11-foot-long (3.4 m) robotic arm.

During the brief touchdown, the spacecraft blasted Bennu's surface with nitrogen gas. This stirred up dirt and rock that could then be collected by the arm's sampling head, which the mission team members have likened to an older car's air filter. The OSIRIS-REx team will spend the next week or so assessing how much asteroid material was collected. Researchers and scientists have expressed confidence that this first attempt will succeed, OSIRIS-REx's sampler was designed to snag at least 150 grams and could theoretically get up to 4kgs of material if everything went perfectly.

But if OSIRIS-REx is deemed to have short on the collected material, another attempt could be made at a backup site known as Osprey, as soon as January 2021. If things went according to plan, OSIRIS-REx remains on course to depart Bennu in March 2021. The collected samples are scheduled to land here on Earth, encased in a special return capsule in September 2023.

Scientists will then study the material in labs around the world, scrutinizing the stuff in far more detail than OSIRIS-REx or any other single probe could do on its own in deep space. Asteroids are remains left over from the planet-formation epoch, so such analyses could reveal key insights about our solar system's very early days and the history of our very own universe.