A Star in the Desert? A Tale of Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sampler

On Sunday morning a bell-shaped space capsule the size of a minifridge will come down through the atmosphere toward a Utah desert, if all goes as planned.

When the probe came to Bennu, they were surprised at the large boulders on the asteroid.

The 4.5-billion-year-old pebbles inside the return capsule are thought to be pristine leftovers from when the planets were first forming.

Scientists plan to study these rocks to find out more about how chemistry led to the emergence of life on Earth, assuming the capsule will not be destroyed in a crash landing.

Dante Lauretta is the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission and compares a fumbling a football in the end zone to being able to make a winning touchdown in the final seconds.

Lauretta, who has devoted about two decades of his life to this asteroid-sampling effort, says that he and his colleagues have already endured a number of heart-pounding, nail-biting episodes along the way. They await the final one.

The anxiety of the mission’s critical moments often gives him strange, vivid dreams. In one dream, for example, he found himself in a gift shop on the rocky asteroid.

I wanted to know how I got this job. I’m not supposed to be selling Bennu memorabilia,'” Lauretta recalls, saying that his dream-self then thought, “If we can build a gift shop, why am I stressing so much about getting all this sample? I could just pick some up right now.”

In a dream, he opened the capsule and saw a green gem on the black asteroid dirt as the sample was about to return. “And I grabbed it and popped it in my mouth,” he says, laughing.

In real life, no one will be tasting the asteroid rocks, although Lauretta says they might get a whiff at some point. He expects a smell like rotten eggs or ammonia.

Lauretta says there is no expectation of alien life. It is highly inhospitable because it has been bombarded with radiation. His team worked with NASA’s planetary protection office, which found that returning bits of this asteroid to Earth required no special precautions.

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The team needed to figure out how to maneuver the craft around the obstacles so it could reach a location large enough for a few parking spaces.

The asteroid behaved like a liquid instead of a solid, and as a result the arm plunged into it.

They’d grabbed so much that a Mylar flap that was supposed to seal up the collection device had gotten jammed open by a rock that appeared to be about an inch across. The gap created by this allowed the dust and pebbles to escape. They were shown floating away in images from an on-board camera.

That moment “was gut-wrenching,” says Jason Dworkin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, a project scientist for the mission. Every particle is a discovery that has not yet been made. It was difficult.”

In the end, they estimate that they managed to safeguard about 8 ounces of asteroid rock, but they won’t know for sure until they open the canister up.

Once they do, they expect to see everything from dust to pebbles to larger rocks like the one that Lauretta calls “the troublemaker” — the one that kept their collection device from sealing up.

Source: NASA effort to bring home asteroid rocks will end this weekend in triumph or a crash

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OSIRIS-REx has more asteroid adventures ahead of it as well. The spaceship will keep on going after it delivers it’s cargo. In 2029 it will reach a near-Earth asteroid called Apophis.

This will occur when the spacecraft is about 67,000 miles away, and the capsule will be aimed at a target zone in the desert that’s about 250 square miles.

“It’s the same as hitting a basketball court with a dart and then hitting it with the bullseye,” said Rich Burns, project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

First, the capsule will deploy a small drogue chute to keep itself stable. Then seven minutes into its descent, it will open its main parachute and drift to the ground for six more minutes. Recovery helicopters will get the first view of its rapid descent. The Utah Test and Training Range and the Dugway Proving grounds are in a remote area and are covered in soft soil. It is an active range so a military representative will check the area to make sure there is no unexploded ordnance when NASA personnel approach to retrieve the container.

In 2004, a parachute failure doomed a NASA mission called Genesis that was returning with samples of solar wind particles. Lauretta says his team has watched video of that mishap “way too many times.”

Some researchers will take samples of soil and other materials in case there is some kind of contamination, despite their best efforts, as they later have to figure out what came from the asteroid.

If the capsule’s homecoming proceeds without a hitch, the asteroid sample will remain utterly untainted — making it different from space rocks that regularly fall to Earth and get collected as meteorites.

On Monday, workers will fly the canister to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, which has a repository for outer space samples.

“I expect we’re going to see dust adhering to the surfaces as soon as we open the canister,” he says, adding that this asteroid dust will immediately get put into microscopes and other instruments.

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“It’ll be a slow process, very deliberate,” says Dworkin. There are a lot of screws and bolts that need to be removed. Every screw head could have Bennu material inside of it that we have to pluck out to preserve.”

Researchers expect to hold a press conference on October 11 to go over everything that got collected and their initial findings. About a quarter of the asteroid sample will immediately get farmed out to researchers, who have set up their labs to analyze it.

Some of it will get saved for the future, so that researchers can study it with technology that hasn’t even been invented yet — just like some Apollo moon rocks got left in sealed containers for about half-a-century before being opened up and studied.

In early October, the space agency will launch the Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid, a nickel-iron one that looks like the building block of planetary cores.

Lucy will make its first rendezvous with an asteroid in a planned 12-year trip to travel to multiple space rocks that are close to the Sun. These asteroids are thought to be remnants from the formation of the outer planets.

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The capsule, which is roughly the size of an ice chest, has to make it down to Earth safely. Slowing from 28,000 miles per hour to just 11 will be necessary. The capsule recovery takes place with the help of Lockheed Martin. “We have done sample returns before, so we have that experience,” says Sandra Freund, a systems engineer at Lockheed and the OSIRIS-REx program manager, referring to previous NASA missions that collected materials from a comet and the solar wind. “We know we can do this, but there’s always a risk when you’re bringing something back to Earth. You’ve got atmospheric reentry, which is a very fiery experience. There are parachutes that need to deploy. There are a lot of things that need to be perfect.

The heat shield on the capsule is designed to save it from burning up in the atmosphere like a meteorite or a satellite. It’s important that when you bring an object through the atmosphere, there’s protection for it. It can be pretty gnarly,” says Todd White, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, who worked on the spacecraft’s thermal protection system. The heat shield is made of a lightweight chopped carbon fiber infused with resin, and it’s ablative, meaning that it slowly burns off. “It looks nice and brown on the back and white on the front—but when it lands it’ll look charred and crispy,” White says.