2024-01-12 |
Finally! NASA Gains Access to Bennu Samples |
Two stubborn fasteners on the
glove-box sized Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition instrument has kept
NASA scientists from reaching material collected by OSIRIS-REx in its
mission to asteroid Bennu. But after weeks pf effort NASA recently
announced success in gaining the precious cargo.
Prying the mechanism loose was no simple task, requiring tools to
minimize the risk of damaging or contaminating the samples while being
able function within the tightly-confined space of the TAGSAM head. NASA
created two specialized tools from surgical steel — “the hardest metal
approved for use in the pristine curation gloveboxes” while a team at
Johnson Space Center tested the them in a rehearsal lab before using
them to remove the stubborn clasps.
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2024-01-02 |
ESA to Send Mission to Dimorphos |
The
European Space Agency has plans to send a spacecraft to visit the
asteroid Dimorphos and its tiny moon Didymos as a follow up to NASA’s
DART mission which impacted the moon as a proof of concept for
asteroid defense. The mission, dubbed Hera, will seek to answer
questions about how the DART spacecraft’s collision affected the moon.
“We need another spacecraft to go back to the crime scene in order to
tell whether the impact left a crater or entirely reshaped the
asteroid, because with the current data both scenarios are possible,”
said Hera mission head Patrick Michel at the Côte d’Azur Observatory
in France.
Hera is currently slated for an October 2024 launch, arriving at
Dimorphos in December of 2026. The main craft will approach as close
as 1 km to the asteroid while its two “cube satellites” will be
dispatched to land on the target.
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2023-11-01 |
NASA Gives OSIRIS_REx New Mission |
Fresh from a successful mission return
samples from asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been
recommissioned for a journey to study asteroid Apophis during its 2029
flyby of Earth. Renamed to OSIRIS-APEX, it will visit Apophis which is
an "S-type" asteroid made of silicate materials and nickel-iron
compared to the carbon-rich, "C-type" Bennu. By April 2, 2029—around
two weeks before Apophis' close encounter with Earth— OSIRIS-APEX's
cameras will begin taking images of the asteroid as the spacecraft
catches up to it. In the hours after the close encounter, Apophis will
appear too near the sun in the sky to be observed by ground-based
optical telescopes. This means any changes triggered by the close
encounter will be best detected by the spacecraft.
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2023-10-30 |
Daily Minor Planet Volunteers Discover an Asteroid |
Volunteers working with
The Daily Minor Planet program recently discovered an asteroid passing
near Earth. A telescope that is part of the Catalina Sky Survey
snapped four pictures of the northern sky, and the next day volunteers
spotted a clear streak moving through each image. After notifying the
Daily Minor Planet team other
telescopes world-wide were trained on it to confirm the asteroid’s
orbit. Those calculations revealed that the asteroid would pass by
Earth about twice as far as the moon the following week and that it
was about 50 meters in diameter.
The Catalina Sky Survey is a NASA funded project to find dangerous Near
Earth Asteroids (NEAs) based at the Lunar
and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona. The Daily Minor
Planet is a citizen science project hosted by the Zooniverse that asks
volunteers to review animated nightly images taken by this survey to
determine if they are real asteroids or false detections. |
Article |
2023-10-13 |
NASA Mission to Psyche Launched |
NASA launched its mission to
the asteroid Psyche, a mysterious world made largely of metal. The
Psyche mission lifted off at 10:19 a.m. ET Friday aboard a SpaceX
Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The
spacecraft will arrive at Mars in May 2026 where it’ll use the
planet’s gravity to effectively slingshot its trajectory to the
asteroid, arriving in late July 2029.
Psyche’s instruments will investigate the asteroid’s chemical and
mineral composition, topography, mass, gravitational field and rotation.
The mission’s magnetometer will attempt to detect evidence of a magnetic
field around Psyche, which could suggest that the space rock initially
formed as a planetary core. If it isn’t a core, it could be a rare,
leftover object from the formation of the solar system that has never
been observed.
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2023-09-24 |
Success! OSIRIS-REx Sample Capsule Recovered! |
NASA successfully recovered the sample
return package from its OSIRIS-REx mission to Bennu on Sunday, marking
its first return of samples from an asteroid in deep space. Teams with
NASA and the U.S. Air Force located the capsule following its
touchdown at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The
capsule contains about 9 oz of rocks and other material from Bennu
that scientists are eager to study to learn more about the early days
of our solar system.
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2022-10-11 |
Outcome of DART's Impact |
Recent
observations show that NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)
mission has been a solid success. The spacecraft’s impact on Dimorphos
altered the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes. This marks
mankind's first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial
object as well as the viability of asteroid deflection technology.
The investigation team is still acquiring data with ground-based
observatories around the world - as well as with radar facilities at
JPL’s Goldstone planetary radar in California and the National Science
Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. They are
updating the period measurement with frequent observations to improve
its precision.
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