A NASA spacecraft on Tuesday touched down on the rugged surface of the Bennu asteroid, grabbing a sample of rocks dating back to the birth of our solar system to bring home.
The minivan-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, extended its 3.35m robotic arm toward a flat patch of gravel near Bennu’s north pole and plucked the sample of rocks, the space agency’s first handful of pristine asteroid rocks.
“Sample collection is complete, and the back-away burn has executed,” Lockheed mission operator Estelle Church said seconds later, confirming that the spacecraft eased away from the space rock after making contact.
The probe would send back images of the sample collection yesterday and throughout the week so that scientists can examine how much material was retrieved and determine whether the probe would need to make another collection attempt.
If a successful collection is confirmed, the spacecraft would journey back toward Earth, arriving in 2023.
Japan is the only other country to have already accomplished this.
Bennu, located more than 160 million kilometers from Earth and whose acorn-shaped body formed in the early days of our solar system, could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists say.
“Everything went just exactly perfect,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator from the University of Arizona, Tucson, said on a NASA live feed from Lockheed’s mission support building. “We have overcome the amazing challenges that this asteroid has thrown at us, and the spacecraft appears to have operated flawlessly.”
The robotic arm’s collection device, shaped like an oversized shower head, is designed to release a pressurized gas to kick up debris.
The spacecraft launched in 2016 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the journey to Bennu. It has been in orbit around the asteroid for nearly two years preparing for the “touch and go” maneuver.
“A lot of things could go wrong because the spacecraft’s about the size of a van, and the asteroid has a lot of boulders in it,” NASA planetary scientist Lucy Lim said in an earlier interview. “So we have to go between the boulders to get our sample, and a lot of planning went into that.”
Asteroids are among the leftover debris from the solar system’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago.
Scientists believe asteroids and comets crashing into early Earth might have delivered organic compounds and water that seeded the planet for life. Atomic-level analysis of samples from Bennu could provide key evidence to support that hypothesis.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of