Lockheed Martin's Spacecraft Will Take Sample From Asteroid
LITTLETON, Colo. (CBS4) - A new space mission is made possible by Colorado-based Lockheed Martin.
On Friday NASA unveiled a spacecraft that will travel to an asteroid named Bennu to retrieve a sample and bring it back to Earth. It's the first mission of its kind.
The spacecraft is called Osiris-Rex and it was built at the Lockheed Martin in Littleton.
"Asteroids are the ancient geologic remnants from the earliest stages of the formation of our solar system. So we're going back to an era before the Earth existed and understanding how the planets came to be and why there's life in our solar system," said Dante Lauretta, Osiris-Rex principal investigator.
Bennu is about five football fields in diameter. There's a chance it could impact Earth in about 150 years with the force of hundreds of nuclear weapons. Another part of the mission is to learn how to stop that from happening.
"So as the asteroid is rotating and in that 4.3 hour period, it heats up one side of the asteroid, and as it cools down it actually pushes on the asteroid a little bit … it's all about that heat pushing on it and changing its orbit," said Richard Kuhnz, Osiris-Rex project manager.
The mission is scheduled to launch in September. Osiris-Rex will land back on Earth with the asteroid sample in 2023.