 Hello everyone welcome to the NASA night sky network member webinar We are hosting tonight's webinar from the offices of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, California I'm very excited to present this teleconference with our guest speaker and tonight There's a lot of extra competition for our attention with some other things going on elsewhere in the world And so thank you very much for for joining us So our guest speaker tonight is Ed Bashore from the University of Arizona Ed is going to be sharing with us the plans for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to an asteroid launching this coming September We have a few announcements before we go to Ed We are working to make sure every club's contact information was up to date For all of you club coordinators that are out there Please go to your club's page on the night sky network website and check for Outdated content contact information and make sure that what is there's current this will help potential visitors and new members find you and your club Please make sure you check your club's email contact public address Shipping address and website information to make sure that it's accurate and current There are a number of clubs We haven't heard from recently and we would like to confirm whether or not they're still active We also have congratulations To the new prize winners and so ten clubs have won some Mars exploration posters and our quarterly event drawing Through logging their events between April 1 and June 30. These clubs qualified themselves to enter the drawing for the posters David, what are the posters look like? They look like this right here as you can see in my little box there They're awesome. They're on vinyl and they're rather large. They're pretty much like mini banner size So yeah, we got ten lucky clubs. They got these so congrats folks. They got this like the whole retro exploration tourism sort of feel as unpopularly and The clubs who who won who were drawn from the drawing this last quarter are the astronomers of Verde Valley in Sedona, Arizona The Denver Astronomical Society in Denver, Colorado the keen amateur astronomy club and West Dumberston, Vermont the Low Country Stargazers in Charleston, South Carolina the Poncher trained Astronomy Society in New Orleans, Louisiana The Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit in Santa Barbara, California the Charlie Bates solar astronomy project headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina The Wabash Valley Astronomical Society in Brookston, Indiana and the Warren Astronomical Society of Detroit, Michigan Congratulations to all be on the lookout in your mail or in UPS deliveries for your posters We also want to remind everyone that clubs who log at least two outreach events each quarter are qualified to receive toolkits And to enter the drawing if you have not received a toolkit in a while and your club has been logging events You may have already received all of the toolkits. If so, please contact us at night sky info at astrosociety.org To request an additional Or to see if we have any other materials we can ship to your club Also stand by at the end of the question-and-answer period for another giveaway of ASP's total sky watchers manual One of the things you may have noticed is that we have both a chat window and a Q&A window The chat window is for folks to introduce themselves in general chat along with any technical issues You may have during the webinar the Q&A window is where you should submit questions for our guest speaker It helps keep track of your questions so that we'll know whether or not we've answered your questions or not If you do have any problems during the webinar Please send please let us know to the group chat or send us an email at night sky info at astrosociety.org So enough with the preliminaries I'd like to introduce our speaker tonight Ed Bashore is the deputy principal investigator of the Osiris-Rex mission at the University of Arizona Before he joined the Osiris-Rex mission He was principal investigator of the Catalina Sky Survey a leading discoverer of new earth objects Bashore's professional interests are software systems for scientific analysis and instrument control Outside of work Ed enjoys hiking, geology and being an amateur astronomer Someday he hopes to find time to dust the cobwebs off of his 14-inch Lestron in resume photometry of cataclysmic variable stars. Please welcome Ed Bashore Thanks very much Brian. Can everybody hear me? Yep. I can hear you just fine. Excellent. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and get started Let's see if we're are we sharing? Let's see. There we go. How's that? Looks great. Excellent. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and get going. I want to talk to everybody tonight about the Osiris-Rex mission It's always a pleasure to talk to fellow amateur astronomers and to tell folks about our mission Which launches on September 8th, which is just 48 days away So we're all getting very excited here at the University of Arizona What I'd like to talk about is Osiris-Rex as a really a mission that's turning an important corner in our exploration of the of the solar system Our mission is one that's going to return a sample from a primitive asteroid called Bennu and our mission is a New Horizons mission so it's in the same family as the Juno mission which recently went into orbit around Jupiter and The New Horizons mission which explored Pluto just a little bit over a year ago. So we're in very good company Our mission is a PI-led mission. Our principal investigator is Dante Loretta He's my boss and yeah, we all work here at the University of Arizona Our job is to ensure that the scientific integrity of the mission is maintained and to do a lot of the science Processing for this mission during our proximity ops when we get to Bennu in 2018 So what I'd like to be able to do is talk to you a little bit about some of the objectives of our mission What we're really trying to accomplish with Osiris-Rex we Will talk a little bit about our object Bennu and how we came to choose it and why it's important Why we think it's the right object for us to be visiting with our mission I'll discuss some of the instruments that we have on board and what we are Intending to do with those instruments and then I'll show you a mission timeline Which is really designed to give you an idea of what our proximity operations around Bennu are going to be like And I think once you see some of the things that we're going to try when we get to our thousand days around this asteroid You'll be pretty amazed at some of the Outrageous kinds of trajectories that will fly in order to look for that important sample site We'll retrieve a sample and return it to the earth in 2023 So probably the most important objective of our mission It's one of five key scientific objectives is to return and analyze a sample of a pristine carbonaceous asteroid And get the regolith what we it's effectively broken soil in amount a sufficient to study the nature history and distribution of these Minerals that are on the asteroid now in the picture. I'm showing it's not an asteroid at all what we're looking at here I think is a really remarkable image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 36-03 and what you really have in one single image I in fact when I saw this the first time I thought it was doctored, but it's not it's a single image that captures all of the Stellar evolution the entire range of stellar stellar evolution from birth to death and rebirth in one image What you see at the center of the picture is a cluster of very bright hot stars They're massive. So they're burning up their fuel Pretty quickly and they're evolving rapidly just about 10 o'clock off the center of the image is a star that's already starting to blow off some of its Surface material as it becomes unstable and pushing it into the interstellar medium We see other examples of the interstellar medium to the right-hand side of the image Illuminated by the stars and and also new stars forming in the in the regions in these gaseous and dusty regions in the in the nebula Probably most important is around six o'clock or just slightly to the left of six o'clock. We see Several examples of something we call propolis And those are really nascent stellar systems that are forming with planet with potential Planetary systems forming around them as well this sort of thing happened in our own solar system about four and a half billion years ago and We would really like to get a sample of the chemistry of this environment When when this was going on and here's a slightly zoomed in image of one of these propolis and and by now We've actually imaged lots of these things not only invisible light and infrared But in radio waves as well and we're starting to see get a lot more information about these forming solar systems This is really what we'd like to have a sample of If if we could of our own solar system the question is is where might one go in order to get that sample today? Certainly, we could go out in front of my offices here in Tucson, Arizona And try to pick up a rock and analyze that but that rock has been through the the subsurface of the earth It's been moved around by a plate tectonics. It's probably been through a few volcanoes It's been subject to exposure with water and oxygen which are very reactive substances in short The material we find here on earth doesn't resemble anything Like what we would expect to find on the surface of primitive asteroid or in the early solar system So where we have to go is we have to we have to look for some of the some of the detritus That's left over from these formation of of our solar system And we think the asteroids are a good place to do that in particular as we look through our inventory of Asteroids that we have our here on earth. We call them meteorites We've found a small subset of those objects those those material. That's very carbonaceous high in carbon That's very important to try to understand the origin of organic materials that might have given rate given rise to life here on the earth And we think that finding a carbonaceous asteroid is really where we would like to go In addition, one of the big questions that we want to try to answer with our mission is where did the water come from on earth? Even though water is a commonplace material here on earth We really take it for granted. We really don't have a good answer yet for where the water came from and If we can't find water in the in the sample that we returned from Bennu Perhaps that means that that water wasn't present In the early solar system and that maybe it had to get delivered to the earth in some other fashion So these are the kinds of questions that we think delivering the material from a primitive asteroid might might answer Again, I'd mentioned before that I think we're returning a corner with the Osiris Rex mission because This is the first time that the United States has returned a sample from an extraterrestrial object since the end of the lunar missions Over 40 years ago now to be fair We have returned material from a comet with the Stardust mission and we have returned solar wind material from the Genesis mission But with the Osiris Rex mission we in turn intend to return a fairly large sample Our mission goal is to return at least 60 grams, but we think we can actually do much better than that So this is this is really something very important and bringing that material back to earth is key Because we can study that material using techniques that are very sophisticated that we could never miniaturize and put on a spacecraft and Furthermore, we'll be able to study that material using techniques that haven't even been invented yet I know people who are working on the lunar samples today who weren't born when the samples were brought back to earth in 1970 and they're using techniques on those samples that weren't even dreamt of back then and that's the kind of legacy we really want to leave to Scientific community with the Osiris Rex mission, but aside from returning a sample. We also want to study something else We want to study the Yarkovsky effect and also we can start a little Movie here It's a little jerky, but perhaps it will show the effect the Yarkovsky effect is really the the effect that causes Asteroids to change their orbits and become near-earth asteroids. So we really have to ask ourselves If we're looking for near-earth objects, which is something I did for a long time in the Catalina sky survey how do these objects actually find their way into the inner solar system and Because the lifetime of these objects is not very long about 10 million years or so and they eventually run into a planet Fall into the Sun or get ejected from the solar system entirely So something has to be responsible for replenishing the supply of near-earth objects into the solar system And we believe it's something called the Yarkovsky effect and what that really is is the selective heating of Asteroids as they rotate as they orbit the the Sun and that selective heating Actually is re-radiated and that re-radiated thermal radiation actually acts as a little rocket thrust which can change the the motion of the of the asteroid and the orbit of the asteroid Depending on the or the rotation or depending on the direction that it rotates It can actually cause an asteroid to move further out into the solar system Or it can cause an asteroid to move further in and the Yarkovsky effect is not solely important for making this happen Making near near-earth objects happen but what it can do is move asteroids into resonance zones with the giant planets where the gravity of those planets in Combination with Resonance in their orbital periods can actually throw asteroids into the inner solar system It's extremely important to know more about the Yarkovsky effect because it could give us information about how we can better predict the orbits of near-earth objects in the future and that's really the key to success in finding near-earth objects is to find them as early as you can predict their orbits as Accurately as you can so that if you do find one that does represent a threat to the earth you have plenty of time To study it and then ultimately mitigate the collision so finding this a rather establishing Better understanding of the Yarkovsky effect around Bennu will be very important And as it turns out Bennu is one of the most dangerous objects We know about with about a 1 in 2400 chance of hitting the earth in the late in the 22nd century So that adds even a little bit more importance to trying to understand the orbit of our target asteroid So we also have a few other objectives, and I won't spend as much time on these as I did the others, but we do have a very large Inventory a large Library of information about asteroids around the earth taken from ground-based telescopes And what we would really like to do as we approach our object Bennu is to compare our observations of The asteroid as we approach it and as we get directly around it as we start to orbit it with the Observations that we obtained from the earth and we believe that it's possible that we might be able to extrapolate some of the Interpretation of how global observations from the earth Compared to observations taken in situ you might be able to understand more about the existing observations that we have of Other asteroids taken here from the earth using ground-based and space-based telescopes Of course, we want to map the global properties and chemistry of the entire asteroid Not only for the intrinsic scientific value that that represents But also as a way of surveying the asteroid to try to find an ideal sample site Ideally what we're looking for first of all is a say a site that's safe We want to make sure that we don't endanger the mission by going to a site It's got a lot of rocks or that represents some sort of a hazard to the spacecraft We also want to make sure that their sample will material On on venue where we choose to sample our site and so we'll be surveying for that And then if we're lucky enough to have more than one site that's scientifically interesting We'd like to be able to select the one that is most scientifically interesting And that what that really requires is a comprehensive mapping program of the entire asteroid And then finally once we select a sample site We want to make sure that we carefully document the morphology the chemistry and spectral properties of the sampling site at very fine Scales, and that's something that we'll do in a series of very close reconnaissance passes over our site before we attempt our sample So let's talk a little bit about why we chose the asteroid that we chose When the mission was conceived We had about five hundred thousand asteroids in our inventory of Asteroids that have been discovered mostly by the near-earth object surveys But only a small fraction of those asteroids are Are accessible to us using the kinds of boosters that are available to us through the new frontiers program and specifically the Atlas mootler boosters And so getting the energy to go out to the Mars and back with a spacecraft was going to be A pretty sporty of proposition and instead what we chose to do is find asteroids that come to us And those are the near-earth asteroids and at that time we had about 8,000 of those in our in our inventory of objects So we chose to start looking more closely at that list When we started looking at the near-earth asteroids, we found that only about 350 of those had orbital parameters that were satisfactory To meet the the timeframes for mounting a mission and then getting back in time So we really wanted a set of orbits that were ideally positioned for our mission so that we could fly it starting in In 2016 and have the mission back by 2023 If we look at those 350 only about 29 of them had diameters that were over 200 meters And there's a couple of reasons why we wanted to select a larger asteroid from the group First of all small asteroids tend to spin fairly fast And we didn't want anything that was likely to throw off all of the loose material that we would actually be looking for In order to obtain a sample when we were around Bennu So we chose larger objects that had lower rotation rates furthermore Dealing with the microgravity of asteroids actually represents a significant technological challenge to our mission And i'm not sure i'll have a whole lot of times talk about that. Perhaps we could talk about it during the q&a But we really preferred to have objects that were a little larger Allowed us to do orbits and so forth around the asteroid So so we had 29 objects then to choose from Of those only five were carbonaceous and we had already we've already talked about why a carbonaceous asteroid represents an ideal object for our study and and it turned out that That Bennu was really the ideal object and the thing that really nailed that for us Was the fact that just before we started looking for the ideal asteroid uh Bennu had actually been a radar target for both erasibo and goldstone and i believe it was 20 2008 And that's ideal because radar really helps you in a lot of ways First of all, it gives you very precise positions for the asteroid With radar, we're able to get the asteroid position to about plus or minus 10 kilometers And that means that we can reliably target the asteroid. We don't have to do a lot of In-situ studies as we approach the asteroid to refine our our approach Obviously, there'll be a lot of refinements. It's necessary, but knowing where it's at within 10 kilometers makes things a lot easier Furthermore with radar you actually get a shape for the object and that's really important for any of you who happen to see the object 67 P which was the target for the rosetta mission that was a pretty gnarly looking comet and Trying to find a reasonable place to sample from that would have been difficult and also represented a fairly severe Operational challenge as anybody from the rosetta mission would be happy to tell you So we have with benua a nearly spherical object about 500 meters in diameter That simplifies our operations. It's a slightly squat shape kind of a lemon drop shape with an equatorial bulge But overall it appears that it's a smooth surface Using the interplanetary radar at Ocebo. We can only see one discernible feature on the surface That's on the order of 15 meters across somewhere between 7 and 15 meters across And so that's that's really good in addition the radar observations using a technique of circular polarization by polarizing the radar burst and then watching how it gets affected as it gets returned to the to the the transmitting dish Actually gives you some insights about what the surface material is like So we actually have some indication from the radar observations that there probably Is a fair bit of regolith on the surface of the asteroid In addition, we have also done observations with the spitzer space telescope And measured what's called thermal inertia And thermal inertia is simply a measure of how fast or or slowly an object heats up and cools down And loose material tends to heat up and cool down fairly rapidly And our observations with the spitzer space telescope indicate that That we see objects with relatively Low thermal inertia and that indicates the present presence of loose material So that's a good suit good too And then finally we've been able to study Bennu with ground-based telescopes And looking at the light curves it suggests that there's no satellites in orbit around Bennu And that simply was great news because we don't want to have the operational complexity of having to dodge Satellites while we're trying to map the the asteroid So let's talk a little bit about some of the instruments that are on board And I I think this is kind of an important topic because I've said to a lot of folks if we ever have to fly A mission to an asteroid that we know is dangerous We'll probably fly instruments that are very similar to the ones that we have on Osiris Rex We have a an optical camera suite That was built here at the University of Arizona called O cams. That's the Osiris Rex camera suite And it really consists of three independent cameras at the top is poly cam and it's an eight inch rich accretion telescope Which basically acquires the asteroid very early during approach and also can be refocused to act as kind of a microscope during our low altitude Reconnaissance passes and allows us to resolve material on the surface of Bennu less than two centimeters across So that allows us to map that sample site during our reconnaissance Passes to really make sure that not only there is no hazardous material around the sample site But there's also material for sampling The Sam cam, which is at about three o'clock in your slide there It actually is a specialized camera that images the sampling event So it's got a range of focus that is ideally set up to Witness our sample event. In addition, it has a filtered wheel with three clear filters So in the event that we have to attempt the sampling more than once We can change that filter in the event that the previous sampling attempt might have covered the camera with some dust So we we get that opportunity without having to cloud our optics at the bottom is our camera control module Which controls all three cameras so The cameras can only operate one at a time and the camera control module will switch From one camera to the other all three cameras share the identical focal plane. So they have the same ccds They're 1024 by 1024 ccd cameras and then on the left is map cam, which is a smaller Camera, but it has a color filter wheel So this allows us to perform color imagery as well as do broadband spectrophotometry Of the asteroid. So we're looking for things like space weathering And also attempting to understand better the reflectivity of the asteroid using some of our the reflectivity of the asteroid For the lidars that we'll be using for our investigations of the surface as well as for our guidance and navigation Down to the surface. So that's our camera suite The Goddard space flight center built ovaries, which are is our visible and near infrared spectrometer So this is a fairly standard sort of spectrometry You don't put on a mission like this because this is how we look for the various chemical and mineral species that we think are going to be important To understand particularly organics and water So ovaries maps the chemical abundances around the asteroid. This is a spot spectrometer So it actually takes a spectrum every four seconds So when you turn it on it just starts producing spectra every four seconds and we send back Literally thousands and thousands of spectral spots of the asteroid during our global and site specific mapping The image up on the upper right hand corner is actually our team our ovaries team after they were successfully mounting the the Spectrometer on osiris rex, which is just in the right hand side of the picture And so I'll show you pictures from the remain in the other remaining instruments That all show the instruments getting mounted on the spacecraft or the flight models that as they get ready to go on the spacecraft We also have otis, which is our thermal emission spectrometer. So this kind of complements ovaries ovaries Sees benu from about point four to about four microns Otis sees benu from about Point or two to out to 100 microns So we have nice overlap from point four all the way out to 100 microns By the time you're out to 100 microns, you're really well into the thermal infrared In the shorter wavelengths that are visible from otis You can also get some important mineral and chemical species that we're very interested in particularly some large molecules And this is a cool spectrometer. It's actually flown before this design is flown before on some landed mars missions as well as missions that are flying around mars now from the On on one of the orbiting missions. So this was built by the arizona state university phil christiansons team Absolutely the experts for how you build these things. This will help us also assess the composition of the surface I've mentioned before Understanding thermal inertia around an asteroid is a really important technique For finding that sampleable material that loose regolith that we're looking for So it can identify and tell you the difference between a hard rock surface or a surface that's covered with loose material So effectively we'll be taking benus temperature with otis as well as looking for some of those other chemical and mineral species that we're interested in We also have a contributed instrument from the canadian space agency called ola and that is the okam's lidar altimeter So this is effectively a radar style system that uses lasers instead And this is actually one of the most sophisticated lidars that's ever flown Unlike previous lidars that have flown on missions around mars and mercury. This is a scanning lidar so The previous missions that have flown have been spotlighters So they take individual spots return them and so you effectively get a track across the surface of your object This actually has a scanning mirror So it allows you to scan across as you move along the asteroid and build up a picture And but the picture you're building up is a topographic map of the asteroid And furthermore it's a dual laser system So we actually have a high power laser and a low power laser And that gives us the ability to develop topographic information from as far away as seven kilometers and as close as 525 meters to the asteroid and topographic maps are absolutely essential to the The successful operation of our mission not only because we want to basically map our other Information like spectral data on a topographic a three-dimensional topographic map Kind of like you see on the right hand side of your image or of your of your screen right now We want all of our scientific interpretation to be based on these three dimensional Rotatable maps of Bennu, but furthermore we're going to use these topographic maps for navigating around the asteroid I mentioned before that we have a A low gravity environment Our our spacecraft feels about half of the forces that are on it As gravity from the asteroid the other half of the forces that affect our spacecraft Is solar radiation pressure and that solar radiation pressure is very difficult to model entirely well And the effect of that is that it can actually change the orbit of the Of the osiris rec spacecraft in such a way that if we didn't pay attention to where we are at After a few days we wouldn't know which direction to point the spacecraft to take an image of Bennu And so we have to take frequent optical navigation images And then compare those with the topographic maps that we generate with ola in order to be able to tell where we're at So we'll be doing that about every two hours We'll be taking an optical navigation image and using that to figure out where we're at And I tell people it's kind of like when you fly in to your hometown And you've been over it many many times and you start looking out the window and you go like oh well You know there's the baseball stadium and there's the downtown. I know where I'm at That's the same sort of technique that we'll use when we're developing our optical navigation techniques around Around the asteroid and we'll be relying on ola as well as other sources of topographic information in order to build those maps up So our team can navigate us successfully around Bennu Another instrument that we have on board that we're very excited about is something called rexas and this is a An x-ray spectrometer that will actually look for elemental abundances. So simple elements Like cobalt and iron and other elements actually fluoresce in x-rays And the source of those x-rays that cause that fluorescence is the sun And so we can actually put an x-ray sensitive instrument on board the spacecraft And monitor the solar x-ray output at the same time that we're looking at the Re-emitted x-rays from the surface of Bennu and map out the existence of individual Elemental species on the surface the thing that makes this extremely exciting is this is an instrument. It's built by students We held a competition with an independent funding from nasa headquarters For a sophisticated instrument that would fly on board This spacecraft and return important scientific information That that competition was won by students at mit And this instrument has been designed built and will be operated by those students As we fly around the asteroid very exciting and a really really cool experiment and and and in every way These students have really performed Outstandingly not only in the technical aspects of building this instrument But in the programmatic aspects of showing up at the program reviews and demonstrating to us that they're building an instrument That's going to actually be able to get the job done. So kudos to the folks at mit In addition, we'll have several other instruments on board the spacecraft that we'll use for navigation guidance and and also to Monitor sample storage will have some special cameras That will be doing the optical navigation imagery that I talked to you about We'll also have some special light ours. They're called gn and c or guidance navigation and control light ours Who will actually provide ranging information? To the spacecraft as it makes its descent to the surface to uh to take that sample Uh, we'll also have an additional special camera that will confirm The storage of the head that will obtain the sample in the sample return capsule I want to talk about that in the next slide But we've got to have a special camera that we know we can look at and say yep We've got that that sample head stowed successfully We can go ahead and shut the sample return capsule and wait for an opportunity to go head home Finally, we'll also be using the telecommunication system on board our spacecraft as a sensitive measure of Of the velocity of the spacecraft around venue and as we measure the the changes in velocity the subtle changes in velocity around Benu that's an indication of gravitational or Gravitational masses in Or uh in the in the asteroid we can map those out so we can determine whether benu is actually a monolithic body Or whether it's a large rubble pile loosely held together by gravity So over the course of our thousand days at the asteroid we'll be actually mapping out the internal structure of the asteroid using Uh, uh Doppler measurements from the telecommunications system on board the spacecraft So how are we going to get the sample? Uh, we're actually uh doing a very simple technique Uh using something we call touch and go Uh trying to actually land on an asteroid is a really hard proposition We because of the microgravity we have to find some way to anchor ourselves when we tried to land because Even the smallest motion or the smallest miscalculation And the approach velocity could cause our spacecraft to bounce right off benu In fact, that's what happened with the filet lander on the rosetta mission It bounced almost two kilometers When it hurt hit the surface of 67 p So instead what we're going to do is we're going to approach the surface of benu very slowly about 10 centimeters a second With uh after extending this long arm that you see below our spacecraft in the lower left hand corner Of the of the images and at the end of that arm is a about a 30 centimeter What we call tag head touch and go ahead and frankly I tell people it looked like an air filter off of my 67 taniak Firebird that I had when I was a kid But the difference is is that what we're going to do is when we make contact with the surface We're going to inject a high pressure flow of nitrogen to the inside of the uh of the tag head And you can see a schematic cutaway diagram at the upper right hand corner there And that's going to fluidize the regolith underneath the tag head and attempt to push that out through the sides of the filter But the filter will capture that material And and let the nitrogen gas escape but capture that that entrained material that gets picked up when we inject that nitrogen This whole process will only last about five seconds So we will sense our contact with the surface. We'll fire off the nitrogen We'll capture that material and then we'll jet away from the surface. So we we stay stay away from harm In fact, you can see in the lower right hand corner the actual flight model of our tag head as it's being prepared on the spacecraft So it's already stowed away and ready to go and uh, we're We're excited about that you can see the about I don't know if you can see my cursor, but Right here you can see the three bottles of nitrogen we can attempt tag three times And each one of those bottles contain a 3000 psi charge of nitrogen that we'll use to Inject into the tag head We've actually tested this technique on microgravity flights And instead of the 60 grams that we want to get we've yielded nearly two kilograms of material Collected so if we're lucky to find an area with ample regolith We have every hope that we'll bring back a lot of material from venue So this is what our mission timeline looks like and i'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on that because I have a Uh a video I want to show you but we launch uh at uh in september 8th, which is just 49 days from now We have about 712 days of outbound crews to get to venue Then about um about three months before we actually arrive begins our approach phase And that's when we begin taking images of venue. We start getting information about the spectral properties from a distance And as we arrive at venue, we'll go into a An initial survey at seven kilometers away. We call that preliminary survey and that'll take us about 20 days After that time, we'll go into orbit around venue and we're going to go into an orbiter around one and a half kilometers And we'll spend probably something on the order of 70 days in that orbit That's what we're really going to get our experience doing this navigation technique. I was talking about earlier The optical navigation we're going to be very convinced that we know how to do our optical navigation while we're in orbit a Before we attempt anything more sophisticated in our proximity operations From that time on we'll start our detailed survey, which is a 63 day set of hyperbolic passes Around the asteroid at three and a half and five kilometers Detailed survey is really where we get our global information about the asteroid And that's after detailed survey that will make our initial down select From the global images to 12 sites up to 12 sites where we might want to sample We will study those 12 sites during a period called orbit b and that's a one kilometer orbit around the asteroid After orbit b we will be able to winnow our choice down to two sites a primary and a secondary site And then we'll begin a series of reconnaissance steps where we'll fly over each one of those sites at 525 And 250 kilometers or 225 meters rather and and uh 525 meters So that's really close to get those very high resolution Images of the surface At that point we can then begin that we can make our final choice about where our sample site is at And then we'd be in a series of rehearsals and we're going to set aside a about 225 days for rehearsal We really want to get this right We expect things won't go right the first time around and so we want to make sure that we feel very confident that when we actually attempt tag We're going to get it. We're going to get it the first time At that point around july of 2020 we expect to attempt our sample collection At that point we we will tuck the sample away And wait until our opportunity for departure which begins march 3rd of 2021 That begins a return cruise of 934 days Which gets us back to earth nominally in september of 2023 So that's uh, that's what our mission overall looks like and with a few minutes. I have left I'll show you a quick movie And it'll just take me a second to get that done so stand by Yeah, that's not going to work stand by so if everybody can see that We uh, we begin our our flight actually on september 8th now this video is a little outdated on a atlas 4 1 1 And we will head out directly to benu. So we won't orbit the earth. We'll just begin our trajectory Flying down south towards australia and as soon as we come in Contact with the canberra dsn station will separate, you know cyrus rex spacecraft and begin our Our lonely long journey out to benu That's about two years And about one year out. We'll come back by the earth to do an earth gravity assist The reason we'll do that is because we need to actually change the plane of orbit of our spacecraft about six degrees And that's where we really get a nice boost from the earth's gravity I mentioned the approach phase will begin that about 90 days out from benu One of the first things that we'll do is begin to survey around to see if we can find any objects orbiting benu We can actually find objects down to about 10 centimeters in size Anything that might represent a hazard to our spacecraft would cause us to stop and we consider how we're going to approach our observations of this space or of benu Providing that we don't have any problems. We'll approach more closely and begin our process of preliminary survey Preliminary survey really involves three passes over benu at seven kilometers. These are hyperbolic passes We're not in orbit. That means that if something goes wrong The spacecraft will just fly on by harmlessly with no concerns for An impact with benu We'll be making Camera observations as well as lighter observations to begin building up our first topographic maps of the surface From that point on we'll go into that orbit phase a and this is the time where we really work out The details of how we navigate around the asteroid We we develop our techniques We make sure we're comfortable because we then begin detailed survey And we begin a series of a three and a half kilometer passes and something we call the baseball diamond Where we observe benu from four different geometries to build up stereographic images of the surface from three and a half kilometers We then do a series of hyperbolic passes at five kilometers so we can take our spectral data And this is where we get our global spectral information Of benu and we get that from seven different geometries that several different relationships to how benu is illuminated by the sun So this takes about seven weeks. It's one week per pass and we do that from the equatorial position But the relationship of the spacecraft and benu and the sun is different each time After that then we we can do our down select to up to 12 sites and we go into orbital b Where we begin our direct observations each one of those sites to start winnowing our decisions down to just two Uh, I'd mentioned before that solar radiation pressure is something the spacecraft feels and you can see that in the terminator orbit that the terminator orbit that we fly The orbit actually moves around and that's caused by the solar radiation pressure that the spacecraft feels while it's in orbit And so you can see that as we do this we will build up Direct observations of these individual sites then we began a series of reconnaissance passes So uh One each at least of 225 meters of the surface in order to obtain the high resolution imaging To convince ourselves that there's ample regolith on the surface of the asteroid Then we'll also do some 525 meter passes to get another look at the sites with our spectrometers So this really is our our high context information about the surface of the Asteroid at the sites that we're actually going to sample at Once we've selected a site we begin a series of rehearsals where we leave our one kilometer orbit First we go to something called checkpoint This is the point at which we would make a burn To move down to the surface of the spacecraft or to the surface of the asteroid Once we've successfully done that we'll go a little further to something we call match point Which is where we will actually match our rotation rate of the spacecraft and the asteroid for our final approach to the surface If everything goes well, we're going to go go after the actual sample collection event the spacecraft will Extend its tag SAM arm as you see here. This arm is about six meters long And it has that little filter mechanism at the end that I described earlier We approach the surface of bendu at about 10 centimeters per second This whole process takes about four and a half hours and we're entirely on automatic here The spacecraft is actually controlling its descent and monitoring its position on its own as it descends towards the surface of bendu Once we hit the surface of bendu Well, I shouldn't say to use use the word hit once we touch the surface of bendu We we deploy the gas you can see A graphic here from our microgravity flights of how what that looks like and a schematic of how that process works So after we've touched bendu We've got several sensors which tell us that we've made that and that we made the touch We'll jet away and we'll begin trying to understand whether we obtained a sample One of the ways that we do this is we'll rotate the spacecraft With the sample arm extended and measure the change and angular momentum of the spacecraft to actually weigh the sample We'll compare this with the same technique that we did when we had an empty sample head And we'll be able to confirm whether we have a sample Once we've actually confirmed that we've got a sample We'll put the sample head in the eye of one of our cameras We'll examine the base plate of the sample head where we have a set of contact plates There are effectively stainless steel velcro that can pick up the surface Samples of the asteroid and we'll examine those to see whether we've got a good sample there And to make sure that nothing's sticking out that would interfere with our ability to stow the sample head If everything looks good, then we're going to open the sample return capsule lid We'll place the tag head on the inside and an explosive bolt will be fired leaving the tag head In the in the sample return capsule It'll be closed and then we wait patiently until our first opportunity to leave benu in 2021 And begin a two-year cruise back to the earth Once we're about four hours out from the earth The spacecraft will release the sample head And and then jet the spacecraft away from the earth So that'll go into an interior orbit around the sun leaving only the sample return capsule To return to the earth the sample return capsule is based on the same technology that was used to Bring back the stardust samples and so we've actually got an image of the stardust Sample coming home here in just a second There we go And so that stardust coming home to the utah test and training range just outside of salt lake city That's also the place where we will land our capsule Where it will be recovered and then The the capsule will be picked up by a trained team It'll be rapidly stowed carefully to avoid any contamination And it'll be turned to the johnson space flight center where it will be opened up And hopefully it will be packed with precious samples of asperin benu So let's see. I think i've got just uh one more power point. It might be it. Let's see we will switch our screens We can Now i'm having problems switching my screens. I'll just do this So with the status of our spacecraft we're at kennedy space center. We are completing up all of our final testing We are just getting ready to put the spacecraft encapsulated in the fairing We'll go on top of the rocket at the end of august And so we're all very excited things are going very well the spacecraft's in great shape. No problems So knock on wood. We're going to have a very successful launch on september 8 Finally, i'd encourage everybody to visit our website at asteroid mission dot org We've got a lot of animations there. We have a lot of interpretive materials We have some public outreach materials, which can be downloaded there as well We have some great videos on our own youtube channel At youtube.com slash of cyrus rex and of course we have a twitter and facebook presence as well So with that i'll say thank you and if there's any questions i'll be glad to To to field those if i can Okay, well, thank you very much ed. That's uh, it's really interesting. It's uh, you know It's quite a complex mission when you really think about it We do have a few uh what looks like some really good questions here During the talk. We also had a couple of people who raised their hands And one of the ways that this works is that if you have questions, please Find the q&a window at the bottom of your screen and type your questions in there so that we can see them so unfortunately, we don't have the ability to Have people ask questions over audio. So let's get to a couple of questions here Um, this was the first one and actually it's kind of interesting How and when was the asteroid named benu decided and what does it mean? It's kind of a historical thing and right Well osiris rex of course has a you know, it it doesn't have anything to do with egyptian history But it turns out that the acronym for osiris rex Uh implies a certain egyptian kind of character And so we thought we thought it would be a good idea to name our object because at the time it was known as 10199 r q 36 1999 r q 36 not a particularly easy thing to remember itself so we had we had a naming contest with That was sponsored by the planetary society and we went out to school kids around the world And we had over 8 000 suggestions for names and we proposed a myth mythological names And it turns out benu is the name of the heron That was a companion to osiris And we thought our spacecraft or at least the student that named it I thought our spacecraft looked a bit like a heron with a long neck at the tag sam Arm at the end and so it seemed to fit really well It was something it was easy to remember and easy to spell and it it stopped very quickly So that's how we named it So we have another just a quick question Actually answer this one darien asked is the mission animation video available online? Indeed it is Yeah, it is on to our onto our youtube video channel And so when you go to find actually there's a link to it The outreach resource page on the next network page. It's very large. It's 400 megabytes And so we had a little bit of a challenge Getting it So that people could actually watch it. But yes, you can find it on the nsn website And you can also get it from the goddard spaceflight center. I believe it's the Well, they have an animations page there you if you just google goddard spaceflight center and osiris rex I think you're going to get pointed to a conceptual image lab is what it's called And they have a variety of versions of the animations that are available all the way from 4k Down to something a little bit more palatable and also Just before launch will be releasing a new set of mission animations higher resolution 5k imagery as well as a much Higher fidelity animations of the entire mission. So keep an eye out for those as well Great Okay, we have a viewer Ask this question Is osiris rex going to be running off of solar energy like juno? And if so, is that the main source of power that most missions are making use of currently? That's correct. We have solar panels on board the spacecraft and fortunately Because benu actually orbits fairly close to the earth We have ample supplies of solar energy As I mentioned before benu is a near earth object So its orbit runs anywhere from about 0.9 to about 1.2 astronomical units from the sun So there's lots of solar energy there and yeah, most most of the Missions that we're flying today do use solar panels. There's a there's a A lot of impetus to do that simply because of the availability of The special form of plutonium that's used power radioisothermic reactors is not readily available although nasa's in the process of Of making more of that in conjunction with the department of energy, but there's obviously Issues associated with flying radio thermal or generators as well. So when solar panels can be flown that's generally preferred Okay, great Chris asks and this is another uh, you know energy question But of orbit changes how much fuel is available should extra maneuvering be needed around the estuary? Good question. Actually, uh, so well our spacecraft is about 950 kilograms dry And when we when we load it up with hydrazine, which is the fuel that we use for maneuvering It'll be just a little over 2000 kilograms total So we've got just about 1200 kilograms of fuel on board. That turns out to be plenty particularly for Maneuvers around the asteroid mentioned before that we're flying in a microgravity environment the gravity from benu is so small that the The impetus that we the the change in velocity the delta v as it's called is actually measured in millimeters per second That we need from our rocket engines to begin our descent to the surface So all of our maneuvers around the asteroid take almost a trivial amount of hydrazine It's really getting to the asteroid and then returning back where we'll use most of our fuel Okay, and this is kind of related to this maneuvering question too Stuart asks are there any plans to use the probe after the sample reaches earth for other possible missions as was done with deep impact Well, to my knowledge, uh, nobody's really taken a solid look at what opportunities might exist because we've been very focused on on our primary goals for our mission one of the things that we do know is that the current plan is to Divert the the bus as we call it away from the earth and that will take it into an interior orbit to the earth That means it's going to get hot or hotter than it will normally get And the spacecraft really wasn't configured and designed to operate in a high thermal stress environment So we have some concerns about whether the longevity of the bus will be Will be available or whether the bus would be available for any alternative missions That being said, we have some very clever people at nasa who help us try to figure out What we can do in terms of extended missions And I wouldn't be surprised if somebody comes up with something which which might allow us to get some additional scientific utility out on the spacecraft Okay, thank you. And uh, jim actually asked a very similar question I think that that we could have combined these he said What happens to a cyrus rocks after the return capsules deployed back to earth? And so it sounds like you uh address that fairly well Thank you um, here's another uh Instrument question. We've got time for a couple more than we have a little bit of business to take care of the end Darian asks, uh, why was the richy creptchian optical assembly Utilized versus some of the other Types that they could have used Well, it's a good question and I'll be honest. I'm not uh, I'm not really familiar with why the choice Although, uh, you know richy creptchian objects can correct the image very well So, uh, you know, you know, certainly, you know with ground-based telescopes In my own experience, uh, uh rc optics are are really preferred because they produce a very nice flat field across a wide field of view So my guess is that's probably the original reason why that was chosen Uh, also, it's a sealed optical system that particular configuration was easy to seal against contamination So that probably was another reason why that choice was made early on Okay And I particularly like this question because I thought of this earlier too Stuart asks when you hit the surface of Bennu with the high pressure nitrogen gas to obtain the sample What keeps the nitrogen gas from acting like a thruster to push the probe away from the asteroid? Yeah, we so we looked at that and it's really the inertia of the spacecraft So that's why we have a the spacecraft's moving down at around 10 centimeters per second We actually did look at, uh, a variant of that problem, which is could the spacecraft be turned into an air puck So that that so we actually could slip on we call it slipping on the banana peel And we've done a lot of the, uh, mechanical analyses and we've concluded that as long as the, uh, nitrogen fires off at the right time That's really not going to represent a problem But uh, believe me, we did look carefully at that Okay And the last question that we have this is has to do with our commercial applications. David in Seattle Asks that there's a A lot of millionaires who are backing planetary resources and If there's any commercial ventures that are going to consider using the osiris wrecks protocols We certainly we certainly talked to some of the folks who are interested in, uh, exploiting the economics of asteroids I think it's a little too early to look at that specifically but, uh, you know, we certainly believe that some of the techniques that we're developing not only with the instruments and the observations but the navigation techniques of Of flying around an asteroid orbiting around an asteroid or something that are going to be of tall interest to anybody who would be interested in exploring the asteroids to mine them either for economically useful materials or to Use asteroids as filling stations. Uh, if we do find water on an asteroid We can find we can pull the water from them Disassociate it with solar energy and make hydrogen and oxygen. So we've got fuel To explore the the outer solar system So we believe that the techniques that we're developing here will be of interest But uh in order to we have not had any specific arrangements other than to have conversations with them about it Okay Well, fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Ed. This is a you know, fascinating mission I'm looking forward to getting back. I'm you know, it's remarkable that you're how much you're gonna about to learn With only 60 grams of material. It's remarkable what uh, you know What you're gonna learn from that small amount of material You bet and in fact, uh, just uh, three quarters of that 60 grams will be archived for the future So we only need 25 to actually meet all of our mission goals. Well, that's good. That's good. We won't all be destroyed That's right. Excellent. Well, that's all for tonight everyone You'll be able to find this telecon along with many others on the next sky network Under the outreach resources section just search for webinar We'll also post tonight's presentation on the next sky network youtube page by the end of the week You can also find other resources and activities including the the video that ed showed on this webinar's dedicated resource page Now for our