A new contract between NASA and the University of Arizona to collect a sample from an asteroid will include an instrument built through ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.
The new asteroid sample-return mission is called OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, and Regolith Explorer.
The goal of the OSIRIS-REx mission is to gather a sample of carbonaceous rocks, soil, and dust from an asteroid, as well as collect more information on the asteroid such as its properties and the effect sunlight has on its orbit.
The instrument that is going to be built at ASU is the OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer, or OTES for short. Greg Mehall is a project engineer for OTES at ASU and has overseen the development of previous ASU flight instruments. He said OTES will contain elements that are similar to the Mars rover infrared spectrometers.
OTES will be built in facilities on the first floor of the new Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 4, which is being constructed on the corner of Terrace Road and McCallister Avenue on the Tempe campus. It will be the first complex electro-optical instrument for space flight to be built at ASU.
“We’re going to built it on site at ASU which is exciting” Mehall said. “There’s probably four or five universities that can do this, build flight hardware on campus.”
The OTES team will consist of about a dozen professional engineers and some faculty on campus, Mehall said. There will also be opportunities for students to become involved.
“There are a lot of opportunities for the students; that’s the whole point,” he said. “Our goal is to have to have students as integrated with professionals as we can, which doesn’t happen often at other universities.”
OSIRIS-REx will launch in September 2016 and meet asteroid 1999 RQ36 in November 2019. It will spend up to 15 months surveying the asteroid's mineralogy with OTES. The instrument will then collect 60 grams of material from the asteroid’s surface to bring back to Earth.
Mehall said OTES will be completed by the Fall of 2015.
“From fall of 2013 to fall of 2015 we’ll be building the hardware,” he said.
After the sample is collected, OSIRIS-REx will return to Earth and deliver the sample to a landing site in Utah in September 2023.
OSIRIS-REx is the third mission chosen in NASA's New Frontiers program for unmanned planetary missions. Its budget (not counting launch vehicle) is approximately $800 million. The budget for OTES is about $17 million.
“U of A will act managerial, so they will make sure we stay on budget and stuff like that,” Mehall said. “We’re pretty much responsible for the instrument.”
Reach the reporter at katherine.torres@asu.edu
