Lockheed Martin Space Systems will build a spacecraft designed to return up to 5 pounds of organic material from an asteroid, providing insights into the origins of life.
Capped at $800 million, not including the rocket, the project gives another boost to the aerospace company’s Waterton Canyon facility.
Osiris-Rex, which stands for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Security-Regolith Explorer, will mark the first U.S. mission to bring material samples from an asteroid back to Earth. NASA aims to launch the spacecraft in 2016, with the sample returning to Utah’s Test and Training Range in 2023.
The mission’s principal investigator, the University of Arizona’s Michael Drake, said asteroid 1999 RQ36 is a time capsule from 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system was formed and organic compounds may have seeded life on Earth.
Joe Vellinga, Lockheed’s program manager for the mission, said Osiris-Rex “builds on the heritage of past missions, but each mission moves the designs forward a bit.”
Lockheed will also build the robotic arm that grabs a sample by touching the asteroid for just a few seconds.
The sample will be captured, sealed and returned in a capsule that draws on what Lockheed built for the Stardust comet-sample mission in 2006.
Design work will begin this fall, said Vellinga, who estimated about 200 Lockheed employees will work on the mission at its peak. Most of those will be experienced staff who are wrapping up the Juno mission in August and the lunar GRAIL mission in October.
The spacecraft’s four instruments will study the asteroid for a year before the sample is taken. The information could prove particularly useful.
Scientists calculate there is a 1-in-1,800 chance that 1999 RQ36 — which is 1,900 feet in diameter — will hit Earth in 2182. The asteroid orbits the sun every 1.2 years and crosses Earth’s orbit every September.
A sample return from the moon’s south pole and a landing on Venus were considered for funding. NASA officials said they chose Osiris-Rex because of its realistic cost estimates.
The mission fits with President Barack Obama’s call for Americans to land on an asteroid by 2025.
“This is not on a potential list to visit, but it allows us to examine the asteroid in great detail, and that information certainly will be made available to the human-spaceflight program,” said Jim Green, NASA’s planetary-sciences division director.
Wednesday’s announcement by NASA is the second piece of good news the company has received this week. On Tuesday, NASA said the Orion spacecraft, also being built in the Jefferson County facility, would serve as the model for the next-generation spacecraft.
Ann Schrader: 303-954-1967 or aschrader@denverpost.com
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1-in-1,800 Chance, calculated by scientists, that the asteroid 1999 RQ36 hits Earth in 2182
