NASA Launches First-Ever Mission to Intercept Asteroid

OSIRIS-REx scientists will do their evaluations at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

The mission plans for OSIRIS-REx to go to Bennu, a near-earth asteroid of about 500 meters in diameter.

The CSA also funds a team of Canadian scientists contributing to the mission: Dr. Edward Cloutis, University of Winnipeg; Dr. Rebecca Ghent, University of Toronto; Dr. Alan Hildebrand, University of Calgary; and Dr. Kim Tait, Royal Ontario Museum.

Once it settles into orbit around Bennu in 2018, Osiris-Rex will spend up to two more years mapping the asteroid’s surface and taking inventory of its chemical and mineral composition.

The planning process leading to Thursday’s 4:05 p.m. Tucson time launch has taken 12 years.

Atlas 5 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral.

“We have accomplished something that few universities have ever done”, Swindle said.

One of the mission’s instruments is REXIS (Regolith X-ray Imaging Spectrometer), which was designed and built by 50 students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), together with other students and researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics (CfA).

Yesterday the NASA Osiris-Rex mission launched without a hitch.

An ebullient Lauretta came into the press briefing room after the launch pumping his fist. “I can’t tell you how thrilled I was this evening, thinking of the people who played a part in this”. “We’ve worked hard to get to this point, the best times are ahead of us”. After dropping the capsule on Earth, OSIRIS-Rex will continue into orbit around the Sun where it will wait for further instructions.

The eventual goal is the soil sample and what scientists can find out from it about the origins of Earth and the universe.

“This exciting and successful launch highlights the tireless efforts of the entire OSIRIS-REx team across many organizations”, said Wanda Sigur, vice president and general manager of Civil Space at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

The OSIRIS-REx mission will investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth.

“We got everything just exactly ideal”, Lauretta, who’s based at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), said during a postlaunch news conference Thursday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Lockheed said Wednesday the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer spacecraft separated from the Atlas V 411 rocket almost an hour after launch, then autonomously deployed a pair of solar arrays and turned on the vehicle’s telecommunications radio.