Noobenheim News for Nerds The mission, called OSIRIS-REx, will begin this month with the goal of catching some 4.5-billion-year-old dust from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu (formerly 1999 RQ36), and of course the successful return to Earth so we can study it. The mission is designed to help scientists investigate exactly how planets are formed and how life began – not to mention learning something about the giant space rocks that could impact us here on Earth.
OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to launch Sept. 8, 2016, at 7:05 PM EDT. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will reach Bennu sometime in 2018 and return a sample to Earth sometime in 2023. The idea might sound familiar – NASA’s Stardust Mission launched in February 1999 to collect dust from comets as well as interplanetary space. That mission landed back here on Earth in January 2006, and we are still learning things from it even after a decade.
Christina Richey, my deputy program scientist @NASA, on why Bennu is a big deal https://t.co/jvtO0aoQli
— NASA's OSIRIS-REx (@OSIRISREx) August 17, 2016
This also builds on the work of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) which has already completed their project Hayabusa designed to do the same thing as OSIRIS-REx – mine asteroid dust. In that case, after launching in May 2003 Hayabusa rendezvoused with the asteroid known as 25143 Itokawa in September 2005. After it collected samples, it came back to Earth in June 2010.
