OSIRIS-REx: Sample Return from Asteroid (101955) Bennu

By Dante S. Lauretta, S. Balram-Knutson, E. Beshore, W. Boynton, C. d'Aubigny, D. DellaGiustina, H. Enos, D. Golish, C. Hergenrother, E. Howell and 38 more. Space Science Reviews, 2017

606 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In May of 2011, NASA selected the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) asteroid sample return mission as the third mission in the New Frontiers program. The other two New Frontiers missions are New Horizons, which explored Pluto during a flyby in July 2015 and is on its way for a flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019, and Juno, an orbiting mission that is studying the origin, evolution, and internal structure of Jupiter. The spacecraft departed for near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu aboard an United Launch Alliance Atlas V 411 evolved expendable launch vehicle at 7:05 p.m. EDT on September 8, 2016, on a seven-year journey to return samples from Bennu. The spacecraft is on an outbound-cruise trajectory that will result in a rendezvous with Bennu in November 2018. The science instruments on the spacecraft will survey Bennu to measure its physical, geological, and chemical properties, and the team will use these data to select a site on the surface to collect at least 60 g of asteroid regolith. The team will also analyze the remote-sensing data to perform a detailed study of the sample site for context, assess Bennu’s resource potential, refine estimates of its impact probability with Earth, and provide ground-truth data for the extensive astronomical data set collected on this asteroid. The spacecraft will leave Bennu in 2021 and return the sample to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) on September 24, 2023.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a93411804817943c5e47cb0446b9f6c77631eff5

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Properties of rubble-pile asteroid (101955) Bennu from OSIRIS-REx imaging and thermal analysis (2019, background): “We will test these hypotheses with observations at higher spatial and spectral resolutions planned for the Detailed Survey [53] phase of the mission in the spring of 2019.”
Rubble Pile Asteroids (2018, methodology): “The OSIRIS-REx surface interaction with its target Bennu relies on a new and novel sampling approach that minimizes contact time with the surface by utilizing a touch-and-go system (Lauretta et al. 2017).”