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OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return


IonStorm

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  On 10/23/2020 at 9:50 AM, AloE said:

I very much look forward to hearing about what did get collected &

more views of the disturbed sight & those ejected materials as the craft backs away...

some nice time lapse animations! https://www.asteroidmission.org/?latest-news=osiris-rex-tags-asteroid-bennu

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This is definitely NOT an animation. It is a series of still images stacked into a video.
Compare the number of particles in the video to the cgi visualization published before TAG to see the difference between real images and animation. 

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  On 10/23/2020 at 11:39 AM, IonStorm said:

series of still images stacked into a video.

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yes, I had intended the word in terms of its meaning of motion of the stacked gif images i.e. "the technique of photographing successive drawings or positions to create an illusion of movement when the film is shown as a sequence."  i see how the phrase is unclear especially in context of the recent simulations.  Thanks for adding the clarification

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  On 10/23/2020 at 12:26 PM, Scotius said:

Lovely, lovely Science *rubs hands gleefully*. I'm not sure for what I'm waiting more - news about organic compounds (more spaceborne amino acids?) or news about mineral composition (metals? metals!)

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As an organic analytical chemist, I'm more excited about the former. :wink:

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  On 10/23/2020 at 11:29 PM, IonStorm said:

We’ll stow it, but every lost particle makes me sad. We could be losing more than the sum of every other non-lunar sample return mission combined. 

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Yeah, that is sad to see, particularly given the fractal nature of Bennu, lol, every particle could be entirely different.

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  On 10/24/2020 at 4:45 AM, AlamoVampire said:

irc they had a semi disaster after returning comet material when the chutes failed to deploy nearly Contaminating everything on impact.

234510232020

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You are confusing the Genesis mission to collect solar wind with Stardust which collected dust from comet Wild 2.  Stardust landed perfectly.  Genesis had a g-switch installed backwards so the parachute didn't deploy and it crashed.  The science was recovered from Genesis, but it took a lot of extra work and time.  Legend has it that the review that could have caught the backwards g-switch was cancelled because of the 1996 government shutdown

Both Stardust and Genesis were designed under NASA's Faster, Better, Cheaper philosophy, where the goal was to have more lower cost missions with less testing, and accept the potential failures.  The philosophy has a problem when the public does not understand that some level of failure is expected as the price of more missions for the same budget. 

 

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@IonStorm Thank you for the correction to my foggy memory of which mission suffered the chute failure. It was still a very near thing that the entire mission was not completely lost thanks to the philosophy of Faster, Better, Cheaper triggering that mishap. I still assert my wishes that the mission returns safely to Earth and that scientists are given years of fruitful study and new information on just what makes our solar system what it is. :) 

 

005610242020

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  On 10/24/2020 at 5:57 AM, AlamoVampire said:

@IonStorm Thank you for the correction to my foggy memory of which mission suffered the chute failure. It was still a very near thing that the entire mission was not completely lost thanks to the philosophy of Faster, Better, Cheaper triggering that mishap. I still assert my wishes that the mission returns safely to Earth and that scientists are given years of fruitful study and new information on just what makes our solar system what it is. :) 

 

005610242020

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Thanks, and no problem. I analyzed Stardust material and OSIRIS-REx is derived from Stardust (and not Genesis) so it’s personal :)

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@IonStorm hold up, youre a genuine NASA scientist?? O.O COOL!! Ok, so, I gotta ask it now, whats it like studying the stuff caught by space craft and brought back? The best I have managed is to own some chunks of the Camp Del Cielo meteorite <still cool, but nothin on your level>. Bet you have some stories to tell about the stuff you have had the privilege to handle.

053310242020

edit to fix a spelling error

054210242020

Edited by AlamoVampire
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  On 10/24/2020 at 10:33 AM, AlamoVampire said:

@IonStorm hold up, youre a genuine NASA scientist?? O.O COOL!! Ok, so, I gotta ask it now, whats it like studying the stuff caught by space craft and brought back? The best I have managed is to own some chunks of the Camp Del Cielo meteorite <still cool, but nothin on your level>. Bet you have some stories to tell about the stuff you have had the privilege to handle.

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Yes, that's the point of this thread; see the first posts.  I'm the Project Scientist for OSIRIS-REx, the Senior Scientist for Astrobiology at in the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (and formerly Chief of Astrochemistry), and Director of the Goddard Center for Astrobiology.  My research is studying organic material in extraterrestrial samples, though I've done other non-sample work.

I don't study iron meteorites (much, we have a paper under review now).  But studying material older than the Earth is thrilling, and knowing that my analyses destroy the sample is humbling.

I also play KSP, but not very well nor very often.  But as a chemist, I can attest to the accuracy of xkcd's assessment.

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  On 10/25/2020 at 1:53 AM, AlamoVampire said:

@IonStorm please accept my humble congratulations to you and everyone on safely touching Bennu and pulling up those samples! May your samples arrive safely!

205320242020

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Thank you. The samples are ours. Anyone with a good idea and a proven technique can request samples to analyze for decades after the return, just like Apollo samples. 

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So the expectation was that the collector would touch the surface and stop, but it pushed in half a meter? That's already a major discovery in itself, no?

Giving in to speculation, asteroid "mining" might be really, really easy?

Edited by HebaruSan
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  On 10/25/2020 at 6:14 AM, HebaruSan said:

So the expectation was that the collector would touch the surface and stop, but it pushed in half a meter? That's already a major discovery in itself, no?

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Very much so.  This was one end member in our simulations, though we never seriously expected it to penetrate that far.  However, the back away thruster ignition timing was designed to prevent the the instrument deck from making contact in the unlikely event that what happened happened. 

  On 10/25/2020 at 6:14 AM, HebaruSan said:

Giving in to speculation, asteroid "mining" might be really, really easy?

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Maybe, there is still nothing to hold on to, also we don't know how typical this spot was.  Analysis is coming, but first the science and engineering team is working together to stow the sample.

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@IonStormGreat news about the collection, hopefully the samples get here safely and give you many years of quality work and sciencing.

Is there a chance for additional sampling with the redundant gas or does the mechanism construction not allow it, considering the current issue?

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  On 10/25/2020 at 8:29 PM, IonStorm said:

Maybe, there is still nothing to hold on to, also we don't know how typical this spot was.

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If it does turn out to be typical, that's yet another thing that needs to be fixed about sci fi "asteroid field" scenes...

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  On 10/25/2020 at 8:41 PM, Shpaget said:

@IonStormGreat news about the collection, hopefully the samples get here safely and give you many years of quality work and sciencing.

Is there a chance for additional sampling with the redundant gas or does the mechanism construction not allow it, considering the current issue?

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There are two gas bottles left, but only one sampling head and one sample return capsule.   So after the sample is back on Earth one could try creative things to do with the gas, like trying to clean the optics or making a crater with it on some asteroid. 

  On 10/25/2020 at 8:59 PM, HebaruSan said:

If it does turn out to be typical, that's yet another thing that needs to be fixed about sci fi "asteroid field" scenes...

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Those scenes were never accurate. The distance between asteroids is so large navigating between them is easy. I expect there will be many comparisons between NEAR’s landing on Eros, Hayabusa2’s two samplings and impact and OSIRIS-REx’s data. 

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