After several months of meticulous, careful work, NASA has the final total for their haul of asteroidal material from the OSIRIS-REx mission to Bennu. The highly successful mission successfully collected 121.6 grams, or almost 4.3 ounces, of rock and dust. It won’t be long before scientists get their hands on these samples and start analyzing them.
Continue reading “OSIRIS-REx’s Final Haul: 121.6 Grams from Asteroid Bennu”Finally, Let’s Look at the Asteroid Treasure Returned to Earth by OSIRIS-REx
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx delivered its precious cargo to Earth on September 24th, 2023. The sample from asteroid Bennu is contained inside the spacecraft’s sampling head, and it’s in safe hands at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Two stubborn fasteners delayed the opening of the sampling head, but they’ve been removed, and now we can see inside.
What looks like unremarkable dirt is primordial asteroidal material that’s billions of years old, a natural treasure trove that eager scientists can’t wait to begin studying.
Continue reading “Finally, Let’s Look at the Asteroid Treasure Returned to Earth by OSIRIS-REx”OSIRIS-REx Returned Carbon and Water from Asteroid Bennu
Carbon and water are so common on Earth that they’re barely worth mentioning. But not if you’re a scientist. They know that carbon and water are life-enabling chemicals and are also links to the larger cosmos.
Initial results from OSIRIS-REx’s Bennu samples show the presence of both in the asteroid’s regolith. Now, eager scientists will begin to piece together how Bennu’s carbon, water, and other molecules fit into the puzzle of the Earth, the Sun, and even the entire Solar System and beyond.
Continue reading “OSIRIS-REx Returned Carbon and Water from Asteroid Bennu”Watch OSIRIS-REx Release its Sample Capsule
Most of the spacecraft we send out into the Solar System are never meant to return. Time, space, and entropy overtake them, or else they’re purposely sent crashing to their doom at the end of their missions. But not OSIRIS-REx. Its mission was only a success when it returned to Earth with its rare cargo.
Continue reading “Watch OSIRIS-REx Release its Sample Capsule”We Can Only Bring 30 Samples of Mars Back to Earth. How Do We Decide?
The Mars Sample Return Mission is one of the most ambitious missions ever conceived. Though the samples won’t be returned to Earth until 2033 at the earliest, the Perseverance Rover is busy collecting them right now. Ideally, Perseverance could gather as many samples as we like and ship them all back to Earth. But of course, that’s not possible.
There are limitations, and this means that choosing which samples to return to Earth is an extremely critical task.
Continue reading “We Can Only Bring 30 Samples of Mars Back to Earth. How Do We Decide?”Fly Around Jezero Crater on Mars in This New Video
There’s a reason Jezero Crater was chosen as the landing site for the Perseverance Rover: it is considered one of the likeliest places to find any evidence if Mars was ever habitable for long periods of time. In this great new flyby video from ESA, you can get a birds-eye look at Perseverance’s home.
Created from data ESA’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the video takes you on an aerial tour of the crater. From this perspective, you can see the water features in this ancient impact crater and understand why this was considered one of the best places to explore Mars.
Continue reading “Fly Around Jezero Crater on Mars in This New Video”Perseverance is Building Up a Big Collection of Mars Samples
NASA’s Perseverance Rover has reached another milestone. It’s finished caching its samples for a potential return to Earth. The sample depot is located in Mars’ Jezero Crater, where Perseverance is busy searching for signs of ancient life.
Continue reading “Perseverance is Building Up a Big Collection of Mars Samples”Don’t Bother Trying to Destroy Rubble Pile Asteroids
The asteroids in our Solar System are survivors. They’ve withstood billions of years of collisions. The surviving asteroids are divided into two groups: monolithic asteroids, which are intact chunks of planetesimals, and rubble piles, which are made of up fragments of shattered primordial asteroids.
It turns out there are far more rubble pile asteroids than we thought, and that raises the difficulty of protecting Earth from asteroid strikes.
Continue reading “Don’t Bother Trying to Destroy Rubble Pile Asteroids”Perseverance Takes a Selfie to Show off Some of its Samples
One of the main jobs for the Perseverance Mars rover past few weeks has been collecting carefully selected samples of Mars rock and soil. These samples have been placed and sealed in special sample tubes and left in well-identified places so that a future sample return mission can collect them and bring the Martian samples back to Earth.
Perseverance has now dropped 10 sample tubes and to celebrate, it took a couple of selfies with several of the sample tubes visible in the designated ‘sample depot’ it is creating within an area of Jezero Crater. The area of the depot is nicknamed “Three Forks.”
Continue reading “Perseverance Takes a Selfie to Show off Some of its Samples”Perseverance is Putting its Samples Onto the Surface of Mars, So a Future Helicopter can Pick Them Up
At this point in its mission, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover has collected almost 50% of its samples. The rover is now building its first sample ‘depot’ on the surface of Mars. The depot is a flat, obstacle-free area with 11 separate landing circles, one for each sample tube and one for the lander.
A future mission will retrieve these samples by helicopter.
Continue reading “Perseverance is Putting its Samples Onto the Surface of Mars, So a Future Helicopter can Pick Them Up”