This is exciting; and hopefully it'll bring back more than the tiny grains of asteroid dust that Hayabusa managed to gather.
Dubbed OSIRIS-REx—for Origins Spectral-Interpretation Resource-Identification Security Regolith Explorer—the robotic craft will conduct the first U.S. mission to collect pieces of an asteroid and bring them back to Earth.
When it launches, OSIRIS-REx will be bound for asteroid 1999 RQ36.
This 1,886-foot-wide (575-meter-wide) space rock orbits between 83 million and 126 million miles (133 million and 203 million kilometers) from the sun. It passes within about 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) of Earth's orbit.
What most excites the science team is that the rocky, carbon-rich asteroid is like a time capsule from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, said Michael Drake, director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and leader of the OSIRIS-Rex mission.
Problem is, I read this article as saying it'll launch in 2016, get to the asteroid in 2019, and but the sample won't get returned until 2023. That's a LONG time to wait. I hope I'm on Earth when this one gets back.
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