OSIRIS-REx is the next deep space exploration mission that NASA announced, scheduled to take off in 2016. As it will begin its journey to meet up with asteroid 199 RQ36, the spacecraft will also carry a spectrometer instrument developed by the Arizona State University.
Experts at the ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) will design and build the new spectrometer, which is an adapted version of a highly-successful design. ASU also built the spectrometers aboard the Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
Aboard OSIRIS-REx, the new instrument will be used to analyze the light the asteroid emits in the long-wavelength infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This will tell scientists more about the mineral composition of the space rock's surface.
The NASA mission, whose name is an acronym for the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, and Regolith Explorer, will visit near-Earth asteroid 1999 RQ36, collect samples, and then return them to Earth.
This will be the second-ever sample-return mission (the first was by the JAXA Hayabusa spacecraft in 2010), and the first one to be carried out by the United States. Experts at ASU say they are honored by the selection of their instrument for the space probe.
“The OSIRIS-REx mission is an important milestone for planetary science in the state of Arizona. I am very excited at the prospects of building closer research collaborations with our friends and colleagues at the University of Arizona,” says Kip Hodges.
The expert holds an appointment as the director of the ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration. The principal investigator for the sample-return mission is expert Michael Drake, who is based at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
ASU experts say that they will get on with building the OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer (OTES) as soon as possible. It will be the first complex electro-optical instrument that the team here is constructing. The spectrometer on the two Martian rovers are miniature versions of the design.
“In the past, each of the five instruments we’ve built for NASA were built at an aerospace company in California. For the first time, a piece of complicated space hardware will be built on the ASU campus,” explains OTES instrument scientist Philip Christensen.
He is also the ASU Regents' Professor of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, which is a part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
“This is something we've been working toward for 15 years. It's is a major step forward for ASU – I can count on one hand the number of universities that can do this,” he concludes.