OSIRIS-REx is ready to get the goods. On 20 October, after several years of patient study of its enigmatic target, NASA's $800 million spacecraft will finally stretch out its robotic arm, swoop to the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and sweep up some dust and pebbles. The encounter, 334 million kilometers from Earth, will last about 10 seconds. If it is successful, OSIRIS-REx could steal away with up to 1 kilogram of carbon-rich material from the dawn of the Solar System for return to Earth in 2023. Since OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) arrived in 2018, Bennu has yielded surprises, not all of them welcome. The 500-meter-wide asteroid was not smooth, as expected, but studded with more than 200 large boulders that could upset the sampling maneuver. And every so often, the asteroid ejected coin-size pebbles, probably propelled by meteoroid impacts or solar heating. The boulder hazard, in particular, forced the team to target an area just 16 meters across for sampling, 10 times smaller than planned. “Bennu has not made things easy for us,” says Mike Moreau, the mission's deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. ![Figure][1] CREDITS: (GRAPHIC) G. GRULLÓN/ SCIENCE ; (IMAGES, LEFT TO RIGHT) NASA; NASA/GODDARD/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA (2) Despite the logistical challenge, the boulders contain a prize: veins of carbonate minerals thicker than your hands, the team reports in one of six studies published today in Science and Science Advances . The minerals, which precipitate out of hot water, popped out of data gathered during a close flyby of light-colored boulders near the target site, called Nightingale. Researchers believe the veins grew in channels of fluid circulating within Bennu's parent body, a larger planetesimal thought to have formed beyond Jupiter's orbit soon after the dawn of the Solar System 4.56 billion years ago, before being smashed apart in the asteroid belt within the last billion years. Heat from the decay of radioactive elements in its interior presumably drove the churning, and the presence of so much carbonate “suggests large-scale fluid flow, possibly over the entire parent body,” says Hannah Kaplan, a planetary scientist at Goddard who led the work. This ancient water world is consistent with the idea that objects like Bennu delivered much of Earth's water when they struck the planet billions of years ago, says Dante Lauretta, the mission's principal investigator and a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. The veins also suggest watery bodies like Bennu were a cauldron for the organic chemistry that generated the amino acids and other unusual prebiotic compounds found in carbon-rich meteorites ( Science , 14 August, p. [760][2]). OSIRIS-REx won't be sampling the carbonate veins directly: The chamber at the end of its robotic arm is designed to suck up grit smaller than a penny. That's all right, however, because the small pebbles strewn across Nightingale also contain signs of carbonates and other organic molecules, the team reports today. “This gives me a hint that my dream is going to come true,” Lauretta says. “I want to bring back something we've never seen before.” The team picked Nightingale for its abundant pebbles and because the site appears young, probably because an impact exposed it in recent geological time, leaving it largely unaltered by bombarding cosmic rays. But navigating the van-size spacecraft to a safe touchdown still won't be easy; the site is ringed with building-size rocks, including one nicknamed Mount Doom, along with smaller boulders throughout. Observations suggest many of these boulders are porous, almost fluffy, and would crumble if touched. But the team doesn't want to take that chance: Using its cameras to navigate, the spacecraft will automatically abort its approach at an altitude of 5 meters if the site appears hazardous. The entire sampling attempt, lasting 4.5 hours, needs to be autonomous; Bennu is currently five times farther from Earth than Mars, and radio signals take 18 minutes to reach it. After thruster maneuvers bring it to the touch point with Bennu, blasts of nitrogen should push dust and pebbles into the doughnut-shaped collector at the end of the robotic arm. It will be several days before NASA can judge how much was gathered, based on images of the target site and sampling head, and changes in how the spacecraft spins. By the end of the month, managers will decide whether to make a second attempt at a backup site in January 2021. Either way, the spacecraft will leave Bennu next year and head back to Earth. It will arrive in September 2023 and eject the sample capsule, which will parachute to a landing in the Utah desert. [1]: pending:yes [2]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/760

Olis Robotics, a leader in next-generation AI-driven software for remote robotics in dynamic environments in subsea, terrestrial, and space applications, today announced that it has been selected by Maxar Technologies to provide robotic operator planning software for Maxar's Sample Acquisition, Morphology Filtering, and Probing of Lunar Regolith (SAMPLR) robotic arm. The arm will be mounted to a yet-to-be-named lander as one of 12 payloads that NASA selected as part of its Artemis program to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024 in preparation for a human mission to Mars. Olis Robotics' operator planning software will solve for the extreme latency experienced while operating robotics on the lunar surface by enabling operators to simulate and plan movements from the ground. Olis' software will provide a 3D visualization of the lunar environment and intuitive controls for operators on Earth, providing enhanced control during exploration missions. "The moon provides an excellent proving ground for our robotic operator planning software, allowing operators on Earth to successfully complete more complex missions faster and safer than ever before," explained Olis Robotics CEO Don Pickering.

OTTAWA - Canada will join NASA's space mission to put an orbiter around the moon in a few years, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday. "Canada is going to the moon," Trudeau told a press conference that included a live video link from the International Space Station with Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques. NASA plans to build a small space station, dubbed Gateway, in the moon's orbit by 2026. It will serve as a way-station for trips to and from the lunar surface, but will not be permanently crewed like the International Space Station (ISS), currently in Earth's orbit. According to the Canadian Space Agency, Gateway will provide living space for astronauts, a docking station for visiting spacecraft and research laboratories.

Future space missions are going to reach the deepest part of the final frontier. Some of those missions, like those planned to Mars, may carry humans. But some unmanned missions will rely on technology that either has to be controlled by humans or have the capacity to act autonomously. An article in the journal Science: Robotics, written by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees Steve Chien and Kiri Wagstaff, emphasizes the importance autonomy will play in future space exploration. Researchers currently conduct their work through the remotely controlled robotic spacecraft. The Mars rovers, Kepler space telescope and Cassini oribiter are all examples of spacecraft controlled from Earth to capture the data and images that have offered researchers insight into space.

Elon Musk's company SpaceX will attempt to launch a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday evening, in a bid to send a refurbished Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). The CRS-11 mission is the eleventh for the commercial space company and was originally scheduled for Thursday evening, but had to be postponed due to weather conditions. The weather could play spoilsport once again Saturday, which has an instantaneous launch window at 5:07 p.m. EDT. According to forecast by meteorologists with the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron, announced Friday morning, there was a 60 percent chance of favorable weather at the time of the planned launch. That forecast was worse than the 70 percent favorable forecast announced Thursday night. "The primary weather concerns for Saturday's launch are anvil clouds, cumulus clouds and flight through precipitation," the forecast announcement on NASA's website said.

SpaceX's Dragon cargo spacecraft, carrying 5,500 pounds of supplies and scientific experiments to the International Space Station, abandoned its attempts to dock with the ISS early Wednesday after its GPS navigation system had some trouble. The docking maneuver, in which astronauts aboard ISS use the space station's robotic arm to engage Dragon, is now scheduled for 6 a.m. EST Thursday. During the live coverage Wednesday morning on NASA TV, commentator Rob Navias said: "Dragon aborted its approach to the International Space Station because of an apparent problem with what is called the filter on the Relative Global Positioning System (RGPS) hardware that basically tells the Dragon's on-board computers what its relative position in the sky is to the International Space Station." When the safety system on Dragon aborted its approach to the ISS, it was over 3,500 feet away. There was no impact to the space station, and crew onboard was in no danger.

An illustration of OSIRIS-REx, a collection of sensors, imaging devices and sample collectors, on its way to encounter the asteroid named Bennu. An illustration of OSIRIS-REx, a collection of sensors, imaging devices and sample collectors, on its way to encounter the asteroid named Bennu. A rocket set to take off Thursday evening from Cape Canaveral, Fla., is part of a mission by NASA and the University of Arizona to send a robot to an asteroid. The asteroid is called Bennu, and it's basically a giant rubble pile, shaped something like a spinning top. Scientists believe it's been moving through space untouched for about 4.5 billion years, making it a time capsule from when our solar system was just starting to form.