NASA’s asteroid-hunting spacecraft OSIRIS-Rex

Why in the News?

Recently, NASA’s asteroid-hunting spacecraft OSIRIS-REx (Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer) collected samples from asteroid 101955 Bennu and landed in the Utah desert. 

What was OSIRIS-REx’s mission?

1. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched in 2016.
2. It completed a series of complex manoeuvres to propel itself into orbit around Bennu in 2018.
3. The OSIRIS-Rex’s probe employed touch-and-go Sample Acquisition Mechanism which used a blast of nitrogen gas to avoid contaminating the debris into the spacecraft’s sample collection chamber. 
4. The spacecraft released its sample capsule above our planet’s atmosphere recently and fired its engines to escape the earth’s gravity to begin a new journey to study another asteroid, Apophis, in 2029.

Asteroid Bennu:

1. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter contains infinite no. of space rocks, ranging from pebbles to the 800-km-wide Ceres.
2. Some of the orbits of these asteroids brings them closer to Earth called as near-earth asteroids (NEA) which may turn out to be a threat due to collision on earth someday.
3. Even if these rocks don’t directly threaten the earth, planetary gravitation can cause their paths to change with each orbit.
4. Certain asteroids wider than a kilometre can stray into a collision course with the earth, which can cause severe damage if it collides on earth. This has pushed space agencies to draft plans to deflect them away or destroy them altogether.
5. The regolith brought from Bennu can contain organic molecules that help find how life on earth began.

Can asteroids be mined?

1. Plans to study asteroids is to study planetary security and the origins of life on the earth.
2. Apart from those, it is studied for deciphering the possibility of mining them.
3.  Previous studies:
   1. NASA’s Galileo (launched in 1989) and NEAR Shoemaker (1996) and Japan’s Hayabusa 1 (2003) and Hayabusa 2 (2014) missions have found that asteroids are solidified debris from supernovae, and contain same matter as the solar system such as
      1. dust, rocks, water ice
      2. an alloy of iron, nickel and cobalt, a sort of natural steel.
   2. These materials can be extracted from asteroids,
   3. Water present in the form of permafrost or saturated minerals as a resource in space can be extracted.