Asteroid sample mission passes critical milestone

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

The spacecraft that NASA will use in its first-ever mission to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid and bring them back to Earth, has passed a critical milestone as it progresses towards its scheduled 2016 launch, the US space agency announced on Tuesday.

The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission, which will travel to the asteroid Bennu (formerly 1999 RQ36) and bring at least a 2.1-ounce sample back to Earth for analysis, has successfully completed a series of independent reviews pertaining to the technical health, schedule and cost of the project.

It has now been officially authorized to transition into its next phase, NASA explained, and the milestone allows the project to advance to the next stage, which includes the delivery of systems, testing and integration leading to launch. Known as Phase D, this part of the mission’s life cycle will involve the completion of the spacecraft that will carry its science instruments.

“This is an exciting time for the OSIRIS-REx team,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-Rex at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “After almost four years of intense design efforts, we are now proceeding with the start of flight system assembly. I am grateful for the hard work and team effort required to get us to this point.”

After completion, the instruments will be integrated into the spacecraft and tested, and then the completed vehicle will be shipped to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, where it will be integrated with the rocket. OSIRIS-REx, which will carry five instruments to remotely evaluate the surface of Bennu, is scheduled to arrive at the asteroid in 2018 and return to Earth in 2023.

“The spacecraft structure has been integrated with the propellant tank and propulsion system and is ready to begin system integration in the Lockheed Martin highbay,” Mike Donnelly, OSIRIS-REx project manager at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, explained. He added that the “payload suite of cameras and sensors is well into its environmental test phase and will be delivered later this summer/fall.”

Assembly, launch and test operations got underway at Lockheed Martin’s facilities in Denver on March 27, NASA said. Over the next several months, technicians will begin installing the craft’s subsystems on the main spacecraft structure. A Mission Operations Review, scheduled for June, will demonstrate that its navigation, planning, and science operations requirements are complete.

The mission is designed to help scientists study the composition of the early solar system, the source of organic materials and water that made their way to Earth, and improve understanding of asteroids which could impact our planet. It will complement NASA’s Asteroid Initiative to align the agency’s science, space technology and human exploration capabilities in a coordinated effort to research asteroids and mitigate the potential threat of these space rocks.

Like OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is part of the Asteroid Initiative. The ARM project will send a robotic spacecraft to capture a boulder from the surface of a near-Earth asteroid, moving it into a stable orbit around the moon so that astronauts can travel to and explore it – a step forward on eventually sending a manned mission to Mars.

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