NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex Mission Gets Ready For Travel To Asteroid

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission is reportedly gearing up for a September 8 launch to travel to an asteroid, analyze it and return to Earth with a sample of it for further study. However, the success of the mission depends on the precise mapping of the asteroid, called Bennu. Therefore, the researching team is currently getting prepared to handle the cartography challenges presented by an asteroid.

NASA’s @OSIRISREx gears up for 3-D mapping on the fly: https://t.co/5u45pwglpM pic.twitter.com/FagdS7eSmg

— NASA Goddard (@NASAGoddard) June 29, 2016

"Mapping of Bennu is necessary, of course, but it's also an exciting and technically interesting aspect of the mission," said Ed Beshore, deputy principal investigator of OSIRIS-Rex. The map will be created with the data collected by the five instruments above the spacecraft, according to a NASA report. Once OSIRIS-Rex reached Bennu, it will spend a whole year investigating the asteroid for both operations and scientific purposes.

The period will also see mapping work being done simultaneously, and the managing team of the mission will be involved in documenting the asteroid's shape, creating a set of top level maps and generating a list of probable sampling sites. "These four maps will be the key to selecting a sampling site," said Lucy Lim, assistant project scientist at OSIRIS-Rex. "To make sure the map-making goes smoothly once we arrive at Bennu, we started developing the algorithms and practicing all the steps long before launch".

According to the researchers, whatever the spacecraft learns on the mission will be crafted together like a beautiful tapestry that narrates a story. At the moment, scientists are creating the underlying framework for the map in a 3-D shape model, which is a crucial step because asteroids are not round or specific shaped like moons or planets, rather they are irregular and lumpy. Bennu itself looks like a spinning top, a shape that was detected after analyzing all the radar study data compiled since 1999, when the asteroid was discovered.