NASA spacecraft to retrieve material from an asteroid
MAY 26, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025341
Washington Post : Six years ago, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa landed on the near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa and retrieved a sample. A capsule containing the sample landed on Earth last summer. NASA has just announced plans for a similar mission. In 2016 the billion-dollar OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will begin its four-year journey to the near-Earth asteroid RQ36. Once OSIRIS-REx is in orbit around the asteroid, mission planners will identify a suitable landing site. As the Washington Post‘s Brian Vastag explains, planetary scientists want to analyze asteroid material because of its possible relevance to the origin of life on Earth. Ground-based spectroscopic measurements indicate that RQ36 contains carbon-bearing materials. If the same materials made it through the asteroid belt and landed on Earth, they might have provided a key ingredient for life, carbon.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
