Asteroid Bennu getting first visitor in billions of years

The primary goal of the OSIRIS-REx mission is to retrieve a few pounds of gravel and dust from Bennu, an asteroid whose orbit brings it near Earth every six years.

Launch is scheduled for 7:05 p.m. ET September 8 with backup launch windows for an additional 33 days.

A NASA asteroid mission is ready for blastoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Thursday, when a spaceship will launch to chase down the near-Earth asteroid Bennu and collect a sample from it. For months it will hang out – take pictures, make scans of the asteroid’s surface and create a map.

But there’s one thing worth making clear about this step of the mission: when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft actually does collect an asteroid sample in July 2020, it won’t land on Bennu.

The sample from Bennu could help scientists find out more about the Solar System and how life was started on Earth.

A US space probe was cleared for launch on Thursday to collect and return samples from an asteroid in hopes of learning more about the origins of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system, NASA said on Tuesday.

The spacecraft will leave Bennu around March 2021 and should return to Earth by September 2023. It aims to return samples from an asteroid for further study here on Earth. The spacecraft will then drift in to deliver a slow-motion blast to the rock that will kick surface material up into the probe’s collecting dish. First, after looping once around the sun, the spacecraft will fly passed Earth again on September 22, 2017.

This May 21, 2016 photo provided by NASA shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft inside a servicing facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida after arriving from Lockheed Martin’s facility near Denver. Fact sheet about OSIRIS-Rex says it has a length of 20.25 feet (6.2 meters) with solar arrays deployed.

“I am absolutely not nervous because we have a phenomenal team and they know what they are doing and I have my full and faith that they are going to get this job done”, Lauretta said. “This, in turn will tell us how the thermal properties of Bennu affect the small forces that can change its orbit over time”. An AU is the Astronomical Unit and represents Earth’s mean distance from the sun; the Earth orbits at 1 AU.

NASA’s first-ever asteroid-sampling spacecraft is poised for an on-time liftoff Thursday evening (Sept. 8), and mission team members said they can’t wait.

“This is really an opportunity to bring back a piece of the very early solar system”, Beshore said. They will also measure surface temperatures to ensure that the spacecraft does not overheat as it gets close to the dark and hot asteroid surface.

The name Bennu comes from the heron of Egyptian mythology.

“This is going to be a treasure trove of material for scientists yet to come”, Lauretta said.

Scientific instruments on board Osiris-Rex will map the asteroid and identify its composition. The asteroid, called Bennu-named by a nine year-old from North Carolina-recommended itself for several reasons.

In 2013, Michael Puzio, a then-third-grader from North Carolina, suggested the name during an global essay contest that brought in more than 8,000 entries. It might contain the molecular precursors to the origins of life.

Bennu is also one of the most potentially hazardous asteroids, as it has a relatively high probability of impacting the Earth late in the 22nd century, according to NASA.