Asteroid sample return mission allows researchers to conduct largest geophysical observation campaign of its kind

The OSIRIS-REx project made history last year as the first U.S. mission to bring back an asteroid sample from space — and with it a trove of data. An international collaboration, led by Sandia National Laboratories and including researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, published a study in The Journal of Planetary Science which reveals the preliminary results of the capsule’s re-entry.

The return of the OSIRIS-REx capsule constitutes the largest geophysical observation campaign of its type. “This project was a unique opportunity for us to observe the geophysical signals produced by a meter-sized object moving at hypersonic speeds,” said lead author Chris Carr of the Los Alamos National Lab. “Scientists are unlikely to be ready to collect the kind of data we need to power scientific research in the years to come.”

The campaign involved more than 400 sensors, many of which were stationed near Eureka, Nevada, along “America’s Loneliest Highway.” Given the size of the project, there were many objectives among the more than 80 collaborators. A team of Los Alamos scientists focused on distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), and the article as a whole encompasses many methods for obtaining data during the capsule’s return.

Although space material passes through Earth’s atmosphere, it is difficult to determine where and when the object will make its entrance. Even if it is possible to determine these factors, financial and logistical constraints will almost certainly cause the project to fail. This results in very limited real-time observational data on the behavior of foreign objects entering the atmosphere. The OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule gave researchers a unique opportunity to collect this data.

“For our DAS subteam, it was the fact that we recorded the signal using a cable laid on the surface,” Carr said. “This was the first time such a signal had been recorded by DAS, and as we began field work, we were unsure whether we would succeed. We were very excited to see the first plots of our data and to see that we had recorded them.

Preliminary results from the campaign show implications for future projects in space and on the ground; specifically, assisting in the development of entry and propagation models. This paper documents the process used to detect and record capsule entry and shows that the methods are capable of handling the type of observation needed in a campaign of this scale. It has significantly improved knowledge of space object entry detection and will allow researchers to better understand how objects enter the Earth’s atmosphere.

Now that the capsule has landed and the data is ready for publication, OSIRIS-REx is ready for its next mission. NASA has renamed the spacecraft OSIRIS-APEX as it prepares for a 2029 arrival at the asteroid Apophis.