Lockheed Kicks Off Environmental Tests on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft; Mike

Lockheed Martin’s space systems business has begun the environmental testing phase on NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer spacecraft at its facilities in Denver.

Rich Kuhns, OSIRIS-REx program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems stated via news release revealed by the company, “This is an exciting time for the program as we now have a completed spacecraft and the team gets to test drive it, in a sense, before we actually fly it to asteroid Bennu”.

These harsh environmental factors will also be present throughout the space mission, so NASA researchers want to make sure the spacecraft is sturdy enough to cope with the pressure. It will be subjected to electromagnetic radiation, hard vacuum, extreme heat and cold, vibrations and separation and deployment shock similar to that it will experience during launch.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, which will be the first ever spacecraft to make contact with an asteroid and bring back samples for testing, has entered its environmental testing on schedule, on budget and with schedule reserves. If all goes well, it will then ship to Kennedy in May for final launch preparations.

Lockheed Martin just finished building the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft for NASA.

NASA’s asteroid sampling mission is now in test phase, it has been announced on Wednesday, by representatives at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

Also, the spacecraft was equipped with OCAMS (OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite), a set of three cameras and spectrometers, which were especially conceived and manufactured by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “This phase is critical to mission success, and I am confident that we have built the right system for the job”.

Once it reaches Bennu, OSIRIS-REx will spend a year examining the asteroid, including a detailed study of its chemistry, mineralogy and topography.

There, it will carry out its final pre-launch steps, before the actual blast-off which will take place at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, in Florida.

Environmental testing for the next five months will assure that the craft is ready for the long journey to the asteroid named Bennu and its mission – to grab a sample of the space rock and return it to earth. It is following in the footsteps of other recent asteroid missions such as the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa-2 that launched in 2014. The broader goal for OSIRIS-REx is to aid in the ongoing investigation of how near-Earth asteroids could impact our planet in the future. The probe will likely arrive at the asteroid in 2019, at which time it will take at least a 60-gram sample from the space object, returning to Earth with the samples in approximately 2023. Hayabusa-2 is presently heading to the asteroid Ryugu (which is also referred to as 1999 JU3) where it will collect samples too.