NASA Launches Program to Investigate Near Asteroid

Asteroids, the conglomerates of a varied amount of material, are pertinent places to mine for information about our solar system and origins. They can be composed of ice, rock, iron-nickel, olivine, basaltic and or even just debris constrained by gravity. One of these large constructs hurtling through space will become the object of a multinational project to further study the object through samples.

Led by NASA, OSIRIS-REx will be launched off of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on September 8th, 2016. The mission is expected to reach Bennu, the targeted asteroid, in two years time in 2018. OSIRIS-REx’s purpose is to gather somewhere between 2 and 70 ounces of matter and deliver it back to Earth around 2023. There are several pieces of technology at work, including an Atlas V 411 rocket that the OSIRIS-REx will board, a robotic arm with which the material will be harvested, and OLA. These last three letters represent a technology developed by Canadian Space Agency. The purpose of OLA is laser-based, calculating the interval between the rocket and the asteroid itself.

OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, which is more than a mouthful. The journey itself will take seven years. While this may seem like a long time, NASA hopes that the asteroid could reveal some secrets about the origins of life on Earth. Bennu itself is one of the asteroids closer to Earth. Recently, astronomers have theorized that it is indeed possible for this asteroid to collide with Earth. Hopefully, the asteroid contains some information of human life rather than potentially harming it.

Image via Wikipedia