A NASA spacecraft, which scientists imagine has collected samples from an asteroid, started its two-year journey back to Earth on Monday.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is trying to full a mission to go to Bennu, a skyscraper-sized asteroid some 320 million km from Earth, survey the floor, gather samples and ship them back to Earth.
Staff celebrated on the OSIRIS-REx management room in Colorado because the area car pushed away from the asteroid, whose acorn-shaped physique shaped within the early days of our photo voltaic system. OSIRIS-REx arrived at Bennu in 2018.
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The spacecraft discovered traces of hydrogen and oxygen molecules – a part of the recipe for water and thus the potential for all times – embedded within the asteroid’s rocky floor, stated Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx mission’s principal investigator, in 2018.
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The trip back to Earth will take about two years. The spacecraft will then eject a capsule containing the asteroid samples, which NASA says will land in a distant space of Utah.
NASA says samples will likely be distributed to analysis laboratories worldwide, however 75% of the samples will likely be preserved on the Johnson Space Center in Houston for future generations to research with applied sciences not but created.
The roughly $800 million, minivan-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, constructed by Lockheed Martin, launched in 2016 to seize and return the primary U.S. pattern of pristine asteroid supplies. Japan is the one different nation to have achieved such a feat.
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Asteroids are among the many leftover particles from the photo voltaic system’s formation some 4.5 billion years in the past. A pattern may maintain clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists say.
