Possibilities Asteroid Bennu Will Hit Earth Improve, However Stay Slim

Preliminary telemetry signifies that the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter didn’t operate as anticipated during the 11-hour event. On Feb. eleven, before the spacecraft left its safe home orbit to carry out the flyover, a difficulty occurred with OLA’s Low-Energy Laser Transmitter . Available information from the pass, nevertheless, exhibits that the LELT system did not fireplace through the flyover.

This implies that the day-to-day operational planning of the mission’s Bennu science operations has begun. As of at present, OSIRIS-REx is approximately 480,000 km from Bennu and is 6 days from executing Asteroid Approach Maneuver 1 (AAM-1) on Oct. 1. AAM-1 is the first of four main maneuvers that may sluggish the spacecraft’s velocity on its last method to Bennu. The spacecraft is at present flying at approximately 490 m/s (~1,one hundred mph), and AAM-1 will sluggish the spacecraft’s rate of strategy to Bennu by 350 m/s (~780 mph) to one hundred forty m/s (~310 mph). On Nov. 7, the Mission Planning Board evaluated the mission’s readiness to proceed from Approach Phase into Preliminary Survey Phase and decided that OSIRIS-REx is a GO. Barring any anomalies on the flight system or any unexpected Bennu surprises, the spacecraft will “arrive” at Bennu on Dec. three and start Preliminary Survey’s hyperbolic flyovers of the poles and equator.

A few hours earlier, command sequences had been loaded on board the spacecraft with ultimate changes to the important parameters that might guide the spacecraft to contact with the surface of tiny Bennu . From this point on, members of the operations team in Denver could solely pay attention for bits of telemetry despatched again as the hm10 asteroid spacecraft autonomously navigated by way of the sample assortment sequence. Last week, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft continued on its new post-EGA trajectory towards Bennu. A REXIS Solar X-Ray Monitor testing and calibration exercise started Oct. 9 and ran via Oct. 12. On Oct. 7, the spacecraft’s communications downlink price decreased to forty kbps from 200 kbps.

The spacecraft is currently orbiting asteroid Bennu at a distance of approximately 872 meters with an orbital period of 20 hours. The spacecraft is currently in a terminator orbit round Bennu – traveling approximately 1 km above the asteroid’s surface. The accuracy of the May 26 orbit recapture maneuver – carried out after the Recon C flyover of website Osprey – allowed the group to waive the 2 trim burns that have been initially scheduled for this week. The spacecraft is circling Bennu clockwise , and will stay in this orbit for the upcoming weeks.

The aim of the stray light test is to review and decide the path and amount of undesirable mild that’s scattered into the cameras. The Image Processing Working Group uses these stray-light background patterns to right images which are acquired when the science deck factors toward the Sun, similar to through the search for potential mud and gas plumes around Bennu. The Launch + 18 Months payload checkout and calibration marketing campaign finished this last week with the REXIS checkout on March 13. The mission is now in the midst of extended calibrations for the OCAMS and TAGCAMS cameras, which can run till the tip of this week. The OVIRS spectrometer may even get an opportunity to collect further calibration knowledge as a ride-along exercise during a portion of the extended exercise. Last week, the Launch+22 months instrument checkouts and calibrations progressed by way of their second week of observations.