The first asteroid samples brought by NASA from space reached Earth after the journey was completed 7 years ago. The Osiris-Rex spacecraft dropped its sample capsule from a distance of 100 thousand kilometers, and the capsule landed in the Utah Desert by parachute 4 hours later.
The samples will be flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston tomorrow for examination. Dante Lauretta from the University of Arizona, who leads the mission, will accompany the samples.
In a statement before landing, Lauretta said that opening the capsule in Houston would be “the most important moment” due to the uncertainty about the amount inside. NASA officials reported that it would take several weeks to obtain a definitive measurement.
Scientists estimate that the capsule contained at least a cup of debris. This is expected to be the largest pile of debris from space, surpassing the one teaspoon of debris from Japan, the only other country to return asteroid samples. It is stated that these samples will help scientists better understand how the Earth and life formed.
IT WAS ALLEGED THAT IT WILL CRASH ON THE WORLD
Bennu is expected to come dangerously close to Earth in 2182. Scientists on the Osiris-Rex team had suggested in 2021 that Bennu could possibly drift into Earth’s orbit and hit the planet by September 2182. The probability of the claim in question coming true was calculated as 0.037 percent.
IT IS THE SIZE OF THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING
Bennu, which orbits the Sun 81 million kilometers from Earth and is the size of the Empire State Building, is believed to be the broken piece of a much larger asteroid.
Lauretta said they think the data collected by Osiris-Rex will help in the effort to deflect the asteroid.
Osiris-Rex, which was sent into space from NASA’s Cape Canaveral Cosmodrome in Florida in 2016 and reached the Bennu asteroid in 2018, will travel 178 million miles (about 286 meters) in 2021 after collecting debris from Bennu’s carbon-rich dark surface. He had set out to return to Earth from a distance of one million kilometers.
HIS NEW POSITION MAY BE APOPHIS
After Osiris-Rex successfully completes its mission, it is expected to set out to explore Apophis, another asteroid close to Earth. (AA-İHA)
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