Seven months after its precise touchdown on asteroid Bennu to collect samples, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has begun its return journey to Earth. Aboard is a valuable payload poised to reveal insights into the solar system's formation.
Launched from Florida four years ago, OSIRIS-REx executed its sample collection from the 500-meter-wide asteroid Bennu last October. Over 330 million kilometers from Earth, the spacecraft spiraled down, touched the surface for seconds, and released nitrogen gas from its robotic arm to capture rocks and dust. The sampling head secured at least 60 grams, fulfilling the mission's objective.
OSIRIS-REx lingered near Bennu since October, awaiting the ideal departure. On Monday at around 10:16 p.m. French time, Lockheed Martin's control room in Littleton, Colorado, confirmed the probe had ignited its main thrusters 16 minutes prior to escape Bennu's gravity. Seven minutes later, the spacecraft officially embarked on its return.
This pivotal burn, the most significant since orbiting Bennu in 2018, adjusted OSIRIS-REx's trajectory and velocity to intercept Earth in two years. It will orbit the Sun twice, traversing more than 2.3 billion kilometers to rendezvous with our planet.
Assuming success, OSIRIS-REx will deliver its capsule over Utah's desert on September 24, 2023—the largest NASA extraterrestrial samples since Apollo's Moon rocks.
The capsule will head to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for processing and global distribution to research labs. NASA will archive 75% of the samples for future generations and advanced technologies.
As a virtually unaltered remnant from 4.6 billion years ago, Bennu's materials will provide critical data on solar system origins and possible molecular building blocks for life on Earth.
