Touching an asteroid and bringing some of it home

TUCSON (KGUN9-TV) - UA scientists have a green light for a space flight that could help understand how life formed on Earth, and could help save life on Earth from destruction.

The UA team just got NASA's approval to build the flight hardware for OSIRIS REx, a space probe that will orbit an asteroid, grab a sample, and bring it back to Earth.
       
It's an exciting milestone for a mission that's already been in the works for ten years.
   
By passing a rigorous NASA review, OSIRIS REx is cleared to go from plans and blueprints, to hardware. That hardware will head to an asteroid called Bennu to learn more about early life, and maybe ways to keep an asteroid from snuffing out life.

OSIRIS REx is to ease into orbit around an asteroid named Bennu.

OSIRIS REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta says Bennu is…"one of the most potentially hazardous asteroids known to humanity.  We're going to understand it's orbit and all the small forces that deviate it's orbit as it goes through the solar system."

Dante Lauretta is leading the mission.  He says measurements from Osiris Rex could help scientists learn to change an asteroid's course from a life threatening hit, to a life saving miss.
   
After orbiting Bennus, the mission has even more delicate moves.

The spacecraft is to ease down  and touch down with sort of a space vacuum cleaner, then pick up a sample in hopes rock isolated in space for so long will have frozen a snapshot of the early chemistry of life. 
        
Then the arm pushes the probe away.

Lauretta says, "It's a pogo stick, so we have a spring in this forearm here and that's part of the energy we use to rebound off the asteroid surface." 

OSIRIS REx heads home after that to bring the first asteroid sample back to Earth.

A lot of the precision required will be built in the clean room where UA scientists will build some of the cameras OSIRIS REx will fly.  The clean room required us to dress like surgeons, so not a single hair could float onto a sensor.  To make sure instruments survive the harshness of space, equipment here will heat test items to as hot as boiling water, and chill them to almost 300 degrees below zero.
    
A trip to the contractor who will assemble the spacecraft made Engineer and Instrument Scientist Bashar Rizk reflect on where his work will be going.

"We all found ourselves staring at the various bits of the spacecraft, in awe contemplating that within two years it will be launched out into a place where no human can survive."
    
This sort of exploring takes nerve, and patience.  Launch is set for two years from now.  The probe arrives at the asteroid four years from now, and brings back the sample seven years from now.
    
Some tricky things have to go right in that timeline.
    
That's why space scientists say their work is boredom broken by spells of sheer terror.