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London, 1 September 2023.- A NASA team in Utah’s West Desert is in the final stages of preparing for the arrival of the first U.S. asteroid sample.
A mock-up of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample capsule was dropped on Wednesday from an aircraft and landed at the drop zone at the Department of Defence’s Utah Test and Training Range in the desert outside Salt Lake City. This was part of the mission’s final major test prior to the arrival of the actual capsule.
The drop test follows a series of earlier rehearsals including capsule recovery, spacecraft engineering operations, and sample curation procedures which were conducted earlier this spring and summer.
The OSIRIS-REx capsule is carrying an estimated 8.8 ounces of rocky material collected from the surface of the asteroid Bennu in 2020. The capsule will enter Earth’s atmosphere at 10:42 a.m. EDT on the 24th of September, travelling about 27,650 mph.
“We are now mere weeks away from receiving a piece of solar system history on Earth, and this successful drop test ensures we’re ready,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Pristine material from asteroid Bennu will help shed light on the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, and perhaps even on how life on Earth began.”
When the capsule has been located and packaged for travel it will be flown to a temporary clean room on the military range, where it will undergo initial processing and disassembly in preparation for its journey to NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston. Researchers will study the sample to learn about how our planet and solar system formed, as well as the origin of organics that may have led to life on Earth.
