Rocket Watch

ASTEROID AND BACK: For years now, we've been tracking NASA's planned mission to an asteroid - and back! 

The target is asteroid Bennu, and finally, launch date is imminent. The launch window opens at 4:05 p.m. Pacific time on Thursday, Sept. 7.  (Photos above and below are credit NASA.)

Recently, the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that will carry OSIRIS-REx to space rolled from the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral to the launch pad. 

After a two-year journey, the probe will retrieve at least two ounces of surface material and return it to Earth for study. Per NASA, "The asteroid, Bennu, may hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of water and organic molecules found on Earth."

We found this great overview about the mission online https://youtu.be/3194ROG7VCE
This morning, we watched a pre-launch briefing (archival version available here: 
https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/06/video-atlasosiris-rex-pre-launch-and-mission-science-press-briefings/)

Annabelle sums up OSIRIS-REx below ... 

OSIRIS-REx, an acronym for Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer, is a space probe that will be launched towards the Bennu asteroid, starting tomorrow. The mission of OSIRIS-REx loosely mirrors the story of the Egyptian god Osiris. The god Osiris had a knowledge of agriculture and brought life to the world. OSIRIS-REx is going to be the first probe to actually bring samples back to earth, allowing us to study some of the fundamentals that our solar system was built on up close. It will be groundbreaking if the mission succeeds. The OSIRIS-REx mission will also track the trajectory of Bennu, to see if it is a potential hazard to earth. It will launch on an Atlas 5 rocket tomorrow, with a launch window of 7:05 pm to 9:00 pm EDT. I’m excited to see what valuable results OSIRIS-REx brings back!

CJ has this to share ... 

In recent years, you have likely heard stories about the Philae spacecraft landing on "67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko", a Jupiter-family comet. Philae was carried to its destination by the Rosetta spacecraft. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website, upon reaching its destination, Philae achieved the first-ever "soft" (nondestructive) landing on a comet nucleus. A similar mission is about to be carried out:

On 9/8/16, the "OSIRIS-REx" mission will begin, and a special lander will start making its way towards a very special comet, known as "101955 Bennu". The OSIRIS-REx mission is special in that while Philae sent to 67P/C-G with the intention of just analyzing the surface of the comet and sending the data back to Earth, the OSIRIS-REx mission plans to get to Bennu (which won't happen until 2018) and actually collect a sample of Bennu's regolith (see below), which it will have brought back to Earth by 2023.

If you're wondering, according to Wikipedia, regolith is a layer of loose, heterogeneous superficial material covering solid rock. It includes dust, soil, broken rock, and other related materials and is present on Earth, the Moon, Mars, some asteroids, and other terrestrial planets and moons. One of the important reasons why the scientists at NASA want to take a sample from an asteroid like Bennu is because if humans want to go out and colonize larger comets and terrestrial bodies in the future, we will have to know what materials can be found up there (for example: Silver and water), and where we can find them. Maybe it's in a comet!

A reason why the operators of the OSIRIS-REx mission chose the comet Bennu is because Bennu might be one of the Solar System's earliest comets: Likely existing before the Great Bombardment, an ancient event where countless asteroids hit Earth's surface and significantly altered Earth's surface and atmosphere. In an informational video I watched, Bennu was described as being sort of like a time capsule: A valuable look into the past, showing us *what* exactly the ancient solar system was like, and how the ancient solar system was different from the present-day solar system.

I am very excited for the OSIRIS-REx mission, and I can't wait for the regolith sample to come back to Earth.