Science - osiris-rex

May

2013

6:47pm, EDT

Nine-year-old boy provides name for Osiris-Rex's target asteroid: Bennu

NASA via Planetary Society

An artist's conception shows the Osiris-Rex spacecraft's path to and from the asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft's aim is to bring up to 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of material from the asteroid back to Earth.

By Mike Wall, Space.com

A near-Earth asteroid that will be visited by a NASA spacecraft in 2018 now has a more approachable name — "Bennu" — thanks to a North Carolina third-grader.

Nine-year-old Michael Puzio's suggestion beat out more than 8,000 other entries in an international student contest that sought to rename potentially dangerous asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36, which is the target of NASA's Osiris-Rex sample-return mission.

"It's great!" Puzio said when told he won the contest. "I'm the first kid I know that named part of the solar system!"[NASA's Osiris-Rex Asteroid Mission in Pictures]

Bennu (pronounced ben-oo) is an Egyptian god usually depicted as a gray heron. Puzio nominated the name because he thought Osiris-Rex's Touch-and-Go Sample Mechanism arm (TAGSAM) and solar panels looked like Bennu's neck and wings, contest officials said.

"The name 'Bennu' struck a chord with many of us right away," Bruce Betts, director of projects for the nonprofit Planetary Society and a judge in the competition, said in a statement. "While there were many great entries, the similarity between the image of the heron and the TAGSAM arm of Osiris-Rex was a clever choice."

The $800 million Osiris-Rex mission — whose name is short for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer — is slated to blast off in September 2016, rendezvous with the 1,840-foot-wide (560-meter-wide) Bennu in 2018 and return pieces of the space rock to Earth in 2023.

Planetary Society

Nine-year-old Michael Puzio says he's the "first kid I know that named part of the solar system."

Scientists are eager to study such samples for several reasons. Asteroids are composed of primitive material left over from the formation of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago, for example, and they may have helped life gain a foothold on Earth by delivering water and complex, carbon-rich molecules to our planet.

"The samples of Bennu returned by Osiris-Rex will allow scientists to peer into the origin of the solar system and gain insights into the origin of life,” Jason Dworkin, an Osiris-Rex project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement.

Bennu is also a potentially hazardous asteroid that has a roughly 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2182, so a detailed study of the space rock could come in handy if humanity ever needs to deflect it or similar space rocks, researchers say.

The "Name that Asteroid!" competition launched last year. It was a partnership involving the University of Arizona, where Osiris-Rex principal investigator Dante Lauretta works; the Planetary Society; and the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory.

Contestants, who had to be younger than 18, submitted a name along with a short explanation for their choice. More than 8,000 students from more than 25 countries around the world participated, contest officials said.

"Bennu" will be submitted to the International Astronomical Union, which traditionally has approved official astronomical names for celestial bodies, they added.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Feb

2013

12:50pm, EST

NASA hopes sampling can help asteroid predictions

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

An artist's concept of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft near asteroid 1999 RQ36.

By Megan Gannon
Space.com

The extremely close flyby of Earth by a 150-foot asteroid on Friday has cast a spotlight on the danger of asteroid impacts to our planet, a threat that an upcoming NASA mission aims to investigate.

This week's asteroid close encounter will occur on Friday at 2:24 p.m. EST, when the asteroid 2012 DA14 has a close encounter with Earth. The asteroid will NOT hit the Earth, but it will fly within 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers), closer than the ring of communications and navigation satellites high above the planet.

NASA and scientists around the world will track asteroid 2012 DA14 closely with radar and other instruments to learn more about its composition, spin andother details. But to truly understand asteroids enough to develop effective countermeasures to avoid future impacts, NASA needs actual pieces of the space rocks, and that's where NASA's new OSIRIS-REx mission comes in.

Set to launch in 2016, OSIRIS-REx is an unmanned mission to collect samples of the potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid 1999 RQ36, which is nearly 1,500 feet (457 meters) wide, and return them to Earth. Not only will this effort collect samples of the space rock, but it will also gather the best measurements to date of the small forces that act on asteroids and make them tricky to track.

NASA / Goddard / University of Arizona

A conceptual image of OSIRIS-REx.

There are more than 1,300 space rocks that NASA classifies as "potentially hazardous asteroids." These objects measure at least 150 yards (about 140 meters) across and have orbital paths that bring them close to Earth's orbit. [Can Killer Asteroids Be Steered Away? (Video)]

"Asteroids move at an average of 12 to 15 kilometers per second (about 27,000 to 33,000 miles per hour) relative to Earth, so fast that they carry enormous energy by virtue of their velocity," OSIRIS-REx mission deputy principal investigator Edward Beshore of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement. "Anything over a few hundred yards across that appears to be on a collision course with Earth is very worrisome."

While it’s thought that chances of an impact are slim, it is difficult to predict the orbits of these objects with a comforting amount of certainty. That is in part because Earth's gravitational pull changes an asteroid's path as it approaches the planet. There are also other small forces continuously altering its orbit, scientists say.

"The most significant of these smaller forces is the Yarkovsky Effect— a minute push on an asteroid that happens when it is warmed up by the sun and then later re-radiates this heat in a different direction as infrared radiation," Beshore said. OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer.

The asteroid 1999 RQ36, or RQ36 for short, has one of the highest known probabilities of slamming into Earth, a 1-in-2,400 chance of impact late in the 22nd century. Even more unsettling, a study released last year foundthat the space rock's path around the sun had been altered by about 100 miles (160 km) over the previous 12 years because of the Yarkovsky Effect.

"We expect OSIRIS-REx will enable us to make an estimate of the Yarkovsky force on RQ36 at least twice as precise as what's available now," said Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Scientists hope that new insights about the Yarkovsky Effect on RQ36 will help them estimate the force on other asteroids.

"What we want to be able to do is create a model that says OK if you give me an asteroid of this size, made of this composition, with this kind of topography, I can estimate for you what the Yarkovsky Effect will be," Beshore explained in a statement Thursday from NASA. "So now I can probably come up with a better notion of what to expect from other asteroids that I don't have the good fortune to have a spacecraft around."

OSIRIS-REx, which will arrive at RQ36 in 2018 and orbit the asteroid until 2021, will be the United States' first asteroid sample-return effort andonly the second mission in history to bring back samples from a space rock. Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft successfully returned tiny grains of the asteroid Itokawa to Earth in June 2010.

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