What do you think would be the craziest shape you could imagine
the asteroid being?
[logo music]
Hello space fans, I’m Katrina Jackson with the Office of
Communications at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Two years
ago, in September 2016, OSIRIS-REx launched...
[rocket engine burn] >>ANNOUNCER’S VOICE:
And liftoff of OSIRIS-REx! [cheering] Oh my gosh! Woo!
...NASA’s first mission to go collect a sample from an
asteroid and return it to Earth. Now it’s August of 2018, and
OSIRIS-REx is finally approaching its target, asteroid
Bennu. So I found a couple people who can explain what the
spacecraft is doing during this approach phase and why it’s so
exciting to get to this point in the mission. [music starts]
What is the approach phase of the OSIRIS-REx mission? The
approach phase is when we reach about two million kilometers
from the asteroid Bennu. You know we’ve been approaching
Bennu ever since we launched, but once we reach this period
where we’re about two million kilomters away, that’s when our
cameras can start to pick up Bennu and see it as a single
pixel in the image. So what will you be doing throughout this
approach phase? Sure, so I’m part of the flight dynamics
team, and that basically means that I work with a team of
highly skilled engineers, from Kinetix Aerospace and Goddard
Space Flight Center, and we’re responsible for navigating the
spacecraft. During the approach phase, so we’ll take those
images, we’ll process them, we’ll figure out very precisely
where Bennu is in the image, and we’ll take that data and feed it
into our software, along with some tracking data from the DSN,
range and doppler measurements, and we’ll figure out our best
estimate of where the spacecraft is relative to the asteroid and
also where the asteroid is relative to the rest of the
solar system. And during this phase, will you be looking out
for any sort of hazards around the asteroid, like little moons
or dust? Yeah absolutely. We have specific science
observation campaigns where they’ll be looking for small
satellite possibilities or activity on the asteroid. We
don’t expect any of that but we’ll have to look out for it
just in case. So Lori, I know your background is planetary
science. As a planetary scientist, how excited are you
about the OSIRIS-REx mission and about bringing a sample of an
asteroid back for the first time for NASA? This is incredibly
exciting. The asteroids are the building blocks of the solar
system, that’s what built and made up our planets. They
possibly carry the building blocks, the molecules that could
lead to life. But even more than that, most of our missions we
send a satellite to go orbit a planet or maybe a lander to go
land on the surface. But they stay there and do their science
at that location. OSIRIS-REx is going to grab a sample and bring
it back to Earth. And that is really special and unique. We
can not only analyze that sample today, but then we can save that
sample and as our knowledge grows in the future and as our
laboratory capabilities grow in the future, we can go back and
reanalyze that sample. It will be there for us to keep learning
from. So OSIRIS-REx launched two years ago in 2016. It’s finally
starting the approach phase. How excited are you to get to this
point in the mission? Oh very exciting. Like you said it’s,
we’ve been preparing for years for this even before launch. And
kind of planning and testing and working out what we’re going to
do when we get to the asteroid, and kind of making assumptions
of what the asteroid will look like and how it will be. And we
have some pretty good ground-based estimates, but you
know we won’t know until we actually get there. And this is
the first time we get to see it and it’s sort of starting the
proximity operations phase where we’ll be working in the vicinity
of the asteroid for two years or more. What do you think would be
the craziest shape you could imagine the asteroid being? So
right now it’s fairly a benign shape, it’s kind of bulged in
the center. But if you look at pictures of 67P
Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the comet, where it’s kind of a
rubber duck, I don’t think it’s going to be that extreme, but
you never know. I think probably the worst case it will be really
maybe kind of stretched out more than we think more top shaped
than spherical. Why would that be worst case? So, worst case
for us, ‘cause obviously eventually we have to go down to
the surface and touch it. So if it’s irregularly shaped, or if
it’s kind of rotating or spinning a complex way, that we,
it’s hard to characterize. You know, a nice spherical shape
would be nice for designing trajectories down to the
surface. And if it’s more irregular that would be a little
more challenging. Yeah, it would be nice if the asteroid is
simple and makes it easy for you guys. Yes, it would, but we
can’t, you know as they say, you can’t put requirements on the
asteroid. So we’ll have to kind of adapt our mission to whatever
it gives us, and I think we’re ready. As Kenny said, the
OSIRIS-REx team is definitely ready to start this exciting
next phase of the mission. OSIRIS-REx will arrive at Bennu
in December of this year, 2018, and then it will spend the next
year and a half studying the asteroid. In July of 2020,
OSIRIS-REx will collect a sample from the surface of Bennu, and
then it will deliver that sample to Earth in 2023. So stay tuned
over the next several months and years to learn about the
spacecraft’s progress in helping us unveil the mysteries of our
solar system’s formation.
[music fades out]
[OSIRIS- REx logo]
[satellite swooshes by, beep beep, beep beep, beep beep]
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center www.nasa.gov/goddard