Seven years ago this month, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft blasted off to an asteroid named Bennu. Its mission, to collect samples of this asteroid and return it to Earth. After traveling for nearly 3.9 billion miles, OSIRIS- REx is about to deliver it’s precious cargo. Here to talk about this incredible accomplishment is Heather Graham, NASA Research Physical Scientist.
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WAMC: Heather, welcome.
HG: Thank you so much for having me!
WAMC: Before we get into this mission, can you tell me a little bit about your job and some of the day-to-day action for you at NASA?
HG: Yeah, so I'm part of the soluble organics analysis working group that will be looking at those samples when they get into our labs in just a few short weeks. This has been a really long journey planning all of the science that we're going to do with these samples. And even before the launch, I was part of the contamination control and contamination knowledge groups that made sure that we sent one of the cleanest spacecrafts ever to go and retrieve these valuable and precious samples.
WAMC: So, we have this pretty big asteroid named Bennu. Can you talk about the OSIRIS- REx mission and why we're looking at this particular asteroid?
HG: Yeah, so OSIRIS-REx was a mission designed to sample this asteroid. Aside from just the sampling, we also did an extensive mapping of the surface to understand the geology, and composition and shape and topography of the asteroid before we ever even got the sample. And Bennu is a really important and exciting asteroid because it represents an ancient part of our solar system, very old material that represent what our planet would have looked like at the very beginning. It's got a lot of interesting chemistry that can tell us about what our planet was like, at the beginnings of life. And it also represents something that we're wanting to understand better, because Bennu will come very close to our planet in the next couple 100 years.
WAMC: So, this Bennu asteroid is currently orbiting our planet?
HG: Correct, yes. Just like all the other planets it's going around the sun, it comes closer and farther from Earth as it's in this big elliptical orbit, in about 150 years, we think it will come pretty close.
WAMC: In just a few days, the craft sample carrying capsule will return to Earth, with this being the first collection of its kind, what can we expect?
HG: Yeah, this will be very exciting. So, if you tune in at 10am EST at NASA.gov, or @NASA on social media channels, you'll get to see the sample come in to the range where it's going to be landing in Utah. It's been dropped from the spacecraft, a big parachute will deploy, look I'm wearing one now, and it will gently land on the surface. A bunch of people will rush over and grab it, put it into a clean mobile facility, and then it will be taken to a specialized place for unpackaging and characterizing at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
WAMC: And as part of the team going through the materials of this collection, what is it you're hoping to learn from this celestial sample?
HG: Yeah, so as an organic chemist, and I'm really interested in the origins of life, what this really means is locked up inside that asteroid is that early chemistry that would have been on our planet. And so, if we think about a recipe for making life, Bennu contains that ingredient list. We can look at the molecules there and think about how those molecules relate to processes that lead to life.
WAMC: Outside of the samples collected, what else did we learn about asteroids or just in general, during this mission?
HG: Yeah, so our investigation of Bennu has led us to really think about asteroids. And as I said, there's so many of them and understand that they are diverse and interesting bodies. You know, we learned that it has extensive topography, huge house size boulders all over it. I don't think that was really expected, you know, just from radar images, where it looks very, very smooth. And also, the gravity is just so small, because it's just a tiny body. You know, it's not like a planet with a lot of gravity, and learning how to operate around these small bodies is something we're really trying to learn to get better at because we have many missions planned for asteroids. We're calling this asteroid autumn here in 2023. Because we have so many activities that are helping us learn about these really replete and diverse bodies in our solar system.
WAMC: And again, so just the capsule part of the craft, that is housing the collected sample, is returning to Earth. What's happening next for the rest of the OSIRIS-REx craft?
HG: Yeah, so it's going to continue on, the spacecraft will continue on to another asteroid called Apophis. So, we're calling this next phase of its work, the OSIRIS-APEX mission, and we're going to do the similar mapping, and again, learn how to compare these different, unique asteroids to each other.
WAMC: I have this, kind of imagined, Hollywood scenario of the spacecraft landing on an asteroid and maybe an arm with a shovel comes out to scoop up some of the rocks here. In reality, how did the OSIRIS-REx go about collecting this sample?
HG: Yeah, so actually, the way it works is there's a device that's at the end of an arm on the robotic spacecraft. And that basically just kind of bumps into the asteroid. There's beautiful footage of this on the NASA website, and it was almost kind of like a Roomba, think of it, and just sucked up a bunch of dust and rocks inside that, that thing at the end of the arm, and then pulled that into a capsule, which is insulated so that when it comes through our atmosphere, those samples won't get heated.
WAMC: Do you find it nerve-racking, or does it make your job harder when everybody is tuned into what the results of this experiment is going to be?
HG: Oh my gosh, yeah, I don't know if I'll be able to watch to be perfectly honest. I might just be in the lab keeping myself busy.
WAMC: So, we have until later this weekend, Sunday morning, for the OSIRIS-REx capsule to return and about 150-160 years until the Bennu asteroid potentially comes into contact with us. With nothing else pressing... you know, I was going through your bio a little bit. Can you please tell me about the experimental rock opera that you wrote and produced?
HG: Oh, wow! You must have dug deep into my past. Yeah, I was so pleased to be part of that effort. I wrote a rock opera a few years ago, about Katherine Johnson. I actually wrote my rock opera about her before The Hidden Figures, the book, ever came out. And it staged three times in Baltimore, Maryland, and I've been so happy with every single time I get to share her story on stage.
WAMC: Thank you for that, and what's next for you?
HG: Oh, my gosh! You know, I don't know if I can think farther ahead than the next few weeks of really hard work in the lab. Just look to the scientific literature coming in March. We'll have all of those initial characterization papers coming out. And you'll get to learn along with me about all the chemistry that's possible to store in these asteroids
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We just heard from Heather Graham astrobiologist, and NASA's research physical scientist. For WAMC news. I'm Jody Cowan.