NASA's Osiris-Rex Spacecraft Is Headed for a Flyby With Earth

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

NASA’s Osiris-Rex Spacecraft Is Headed for a Flyby With Earth

By KENNETH CHANG SEPT. 21, 2017

A NASA spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, is speeding toward Earth after a year looping around the sun. On Friday afternoon, it will miss the planet by about 11,000 miles, zooming underneath our blue orb at 19,000 miles per hour, passing over Australia and Antarctica.

The near miss is deliberate.

The Earth’s gravity will fling the spacecraft upward by about six degrees so that its trajectory will match the tilt of the orbit of its destination: a small near-Earth asteroid named Bennu.

“We’re essentially stealing a bit of the Earth’s momentum as we go by,” said Michael Moreau, who leads Osiris-Rex’s navigation team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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Osiris-Rex — a shortening of Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security, Regolith Explorer — was launched last year and circled the sun, returning for Friday’s flyby. It is to arrive at Bennu in about a year. The asteroid periodically crosses Earth’s orbit, and there’s even a 1-in-2,700 chance that it could hit Earth between 2175 and 2196.

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/science/osiris-rex-flyby-nasa.html

[PJMcK]

1. This is a great quote!

“We’re essentially stealing a bit of the Earth’s momentum as we go by,” said Michael Moreau, who leads Osiris-Rex’s navigation team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The slingshot effect that the spacecraft experiences as it accelerates away from its gravitational interaction with Earth is determined by Newton's laws of motion. Energy conservation is a constant in our universe.

Thanks for the post, Eugene.