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Watch live as a Nasa spacecraft returns to Earth with the largest asteroid sample in history on Sunday 24 September. After a seven-year, four-billion-mile journey across space, the ambitious NASA ...
The spacecraft dropped the sample capsule — containing an estimated 8.8 ounces of asteroid rocks and soil — from a distance of 63,000 miles (102,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface early ...
OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and reached Bennu in 2018, then spent nearly two years orbiting the asteroid before venturing close enough to snatch a sample of the loose surface material ...
On 3 December 2018, NASA confirmed that OSIRIS-REx had matched the speed and orbit of Bennu at a distance of about 19 km (12 mi), effectively reaching the asteroid. OSIRIS-REx performed closer passes of the Bennu surface, initially at about 6.5 km (4.0 mi) through December to further refine the shape and orbit of Bennu.
The sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission shortly after touching down in the desert in Utah. A sample-return mission is a spacecraft mission to collect and return samples from an extraterrestrial location to Earth for analysis. Sample-return missions may bring back merely atoms and molecules or a deposit of complex compounds ...
TAGSAM is a robotic arm attached to the main body of the spacecraft that collects a sample from the asteroid, and puts the samples into the Earth return vehicle. [5] Bennu is about 500 meters in diameter and has very low gravity, so the arm must perform the collection in near zero gravity, yet still contend with some gravitational forces from the asteroid. [6]
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The successful October 2020 sample collection, showing OSIRIS-REx touching down on the Nightingale sample site. The OSIRIS-REx mission of NASA's New Frontiers program was launched towards 101955 Bennu on 8 September 2016. On 3 December 2018, the spacecraft arrived at the asteroid Bennu after a two-year journey. [17]