This August, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will be touching down onto the Bennu asteroid to collect samples and bring them back to Earth. This will be The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) first try, and it will not be an easy task as the impact from taking a sample too close to the asteroid, together with the microgravity from the asteroid's mass, could cause casualties on the spacecraft.
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NASA's rehearsal while OSIRIS-REx prepares to touchdown on Bennu Asteroid to collect samples
NASA will be preparing for this mission this week by doing a practice session of the landing named "checkpoint rehearsal." This session will move OSIRIS-REx closer to Bennu asteroid within a distance of 243 feet.
According to the Science Times, "The touchdown event that will commence in the summer will involve three steps: orbit departure, Checkpoint maneuver, and finally, the Matchpoint maneuver that leads to the touchdown. This week's Checkpoint rehearsal will focus on the first two of these three maneuvers. NASA states that it is giving the team a chance to make sure that the spacecraft's Natural Feature Tracking system is in tip-top shape and that the other systems are working accordingly."
The entire rehearsal will take at least four hours to accomplish and will include the extension of the craft's robotic arm, called the touch-and-go sample acquisition mechanism. Rotation practices for the spacecraft into position will be essential to the mission's success.
Researchers had already found a definite landing site for the spacecraft, although it would have been challenging to accomplish as Bennu's surface was discovered to be very rugged. However, with the help of the public, a better site was selected which is in a gravel-strewn pit near Bennu's Nightingale.
The OSIRIS-REx's solar cluster will be entering a Y-wing configuration and will lower to an altitude of about 410 feet. After this, the spacecraft will be placed in its initial orbiting position around the asteroid.
In June, another rehearsal is set to be done that will try to wrap up the Matchpoint burn and bring the spacecraft down to 82 feet in altitude.
The Bennu Asteroid
"101955 Bennu" is an asteroid in the Apollo group discovered by the LINEAR Project on September 11, 1999.
Named after Bennu, the ancient Egyptian mythological bird, the asteroid is deemed potentially hazardous and is listed on the Sentry Risk Table with the second-highest cumulative rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale. It has an increasing 1-in-2,700 chance of impacting Earth between 2175 and 2199," as reported by The Science Times.
This was believed to have come from a massive carbon-rich asteroid that was broken into smaller asteroids about 700 million to 7 billion years ago. It then formed between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Asteroid Belt and has since moved closer to Earth.
The mission is set to launch on August 25, 2020.
