NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft scooped up a pattern from asteroid Bennu in October 2020, and in May 2021 the spacecraft headed again to Earth to drop that pattern off. This week. the spacecraft carried out a trajectory correction maneuver to maintain it headed towards Earth, the place it’s scheduled to reach in September 2023.

NASA has additionally shared extra particulars on how precisely the spacecraft will ship the asteroid pattern to Earth, as this isn’t a easy course of. OSIRIS-REx isn’t designed to have the ability to deal with the unbelievable warmth, friction, and different forces that touring by means of Earth’s ambiance requires so it doesn’t have a strategy to land on the floor. Instead, it can shoot a capsule full of the asteroid pattern into the ambiance and solely this capsule will arrive on the floor.

This maneuever might be difficult too, as Mike Moreau, OSIRIS-REx deputy venture supervisor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, defined in a assertion.” If the capsule is angled too excessive, it can skip off the ambiance,” Moreau mentioned. “Angled too low, it will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.”

This is a part of the explanation that the spacecraft must make these trajectory maneuvers, to make sure that it leads to precisely the suitable place in September of subsequent yr to have the ability to jettison the capsule on the proper angle.

“Over the next year, we will gradually adjust the OSIRIS-REx trajectory to target the spacecraft closer to Earth,” mentioned Daniel Wibben, trajectory and maneuver design lead with KinetX Inc., which is the corporate accountable for navigating the spacecraft. “We have to cross Earth’s orbit at the time that Earth will be at that same location.”

The current trajectory maneuver was the primary carried out by the spacecraft on the return leg of its journey, with additional maneuvers scheduled for July of subsequent yr. Once the capsule has been launched into the ambiance, it can sluggish itself with a parachute because it descends. The capsule will hopefully land in an actual deliberate location on the Air Force’s Utah Test and Training Range within the Great Salt Lake Desert, from the place it may be collected by the Air Force and the Army, then taken to amenities for scientific investigation.

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