A space probe with Tucson roots scratched the surface of a distant world on Tuesday, but it didnโt linger there for long.
The University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx mission made contact with the asteroid Bennu for about 4.7 seconds, roughly half as long as it took Neil Armstrong to announce his โone small step for man, one giant leap for mankindโ in 1969.
Tuesdayโs long-awaited touchdown came at about 3:11 p.m. Tucson time and was broadcast live by NASA from the missionโs operation center at Lockheed Martin, in the Denver suburb of Littleton, Colorado.
Team members from the UA, Lockheed Martin and NASAโs Goddard Space Flight Center broke into cheers when they got word that the spacecraft had completed the delicate and dangerous rock-sampling maneuver.
โItโs almost hard to process everything thatโs happening right now,โ said OSIRIS-REx principal investigator and UA professor Dante Lauretta over NASAโs live feed. โThis is historic. This is amazing.โ
Based on preliminary data beamed back to Earth from more than 207 million miles away, mission team members know the spacecraft touched the surface, went through the collection process and safely maneuvered back into orbit. What they donโt yet know is whether OSIRIS-REx succeeded in gathering any rocks and dirt from the asteroid.
Their first clue should come Wednesday, Oct. 21, as the spacecraft transmits video footage from the touch-and-go on Bennu.
Over the next week, the team will use the probeโs cameras to visually inspect the sampling arm for telltale signs of dust. Then they will direct the spacecraft to perform a spin maneuver that should tell them the approximate mass of the material collected.
If Tuesdayโs sampling run failed to collect enough stuff, the team could try again at a different location on the spinning asteroid roughly one-third of a mile wide.
The missionโs goal is to return with at least 2 ounces of minerals left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, but the team is hoping to bring back considerably more dirt to play with. The spacecraft can hold over 4 pounds of samples, enough to fuel countless discoveries about the formation of the planets and the origins of life on Earth.
Thatโs why Betsy Cantwell, UA senior vice president for research and innovation, describes OSIRIS-REx as a โgenerational science mission.โ
She said she canโt wait to see what UA researchers might learn from the asteroid samples due to arrive back on Earth in September 2023.
โWeโre going to have decades of science out of this,โ she said. โThese kinds of events change the way we understand the world we live in.โ
A lot could have gone wrong on Tuesday.
To reach the designated sampling site, the unmanned craft the size of a passenger van had to steer past boulders the size of buildings and into a rock-strewn crater to touch down in an area no larger than a tennis court.
Contact was made by the craftโs 11-foot sampling arm, which is equipped with a collection disc designed to linger on the surface just long enough to gather small particles of dust and rock stirred up by a blast of compressed nitrogen gas.
Because of the 18-minute communication delay between the Earth and Bennu, the mission team could only watch and wait as the spacecraft guided itself through the descent, touchdown and return to orbit using a sequence of commands uploaded into its computer in advance.
The spacecraft appears to have kissed the surface within about 3 feet of its intended target, said Dani DellaGiustina, lead scientist with OSIRIS-RExโs Image Processing Team.
โSo thatโs incredible,โ she said. โIt looks like everything went exactly according to plan.โ
Sara Knutson, lead engineer for the missionโs science operations team, said she woke up Tuesday feeling calm and confident, but her nerves started to kick in as the spacecraft descended to within about 100 meters of the surface.
As it turned out, she had nothing to worry about. โMy instincts were right. It went great,โ she said.
Knutson and DellaGiustina were part of the local contingent of team members who monitored the touch-and-go from the UAโs Drake Building, which is named for Michael Drake, the former director of the universityโs Lunar and Planetary Lab and the original principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission.
Drake died in 2011, six months after NASA awarded the UA an $803 million contract to bring back asteroid samples.
Lauretta had his late friend and mentor on his mind in the moments leading up to the spacecraftโs historic brush with Bennu.
โI miss him. I wish he was here today,โ Lauretta said of Drake from the missionโs operation center in Colorado. โI know heโd be really proud of us.โ