Scientists Study Artificial Meteor In NASA's Asteroid Sample Mission - UPI.Com

Read more: Visit website

In The News:

• NASA's Perseverance rover discovered evidence of ancient lakes and rivers on Mars (Source: Scientific American) • A team of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley have discovered a massive galaxy cluster that is 10 billion light-years away (Source: NASA) • The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission re-established contact with Comet 67P → Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a 8-month hiatus (Source: Forbes) • NASA's Parker Solar Probe has successfully completed its closest flyby of the Sun to date (Source: NASA) • The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has launched its Hayabusa2 mission to explore a distant asteroid (Source: Space. com) • NASA has extended its Cassini mission to explore Saturn's moon... Titan (Source: NASA) • A Russian spacecraft is heading to the International Space Station to deliver new crew members (Source: The New York Times) • Scientists have discovered a new type of black hole that is much larger than previously thought (Source: CNN) • NASA has selected a new class of astronaut candidates, "the Artemis Generation.".. to join its astronaut corps (Source: NASA)

#news

June 10 (UPI) -- Earth is constantly bombarded by fragments of rock and ice, also known as meteoroids, from outer space. Most of the meteoroids are as tiny as grains of sand and small pebbles, and they completely burn up high in the atmosphere. You can see meteoroids larger than about a golf ball when they light up as meteors or shooting stars on a dark, clear night.

While very small meteoroids are common, larger ones -- bigger than a dishwasher -- are not. Advertisement

Meteoroids are difficult objects for aerospace and geophysics researchers like us to study, because we can't usually predict when and where they will hit the atmosphere. But on very rare occasions, we can study artificial objects that enter the atmosphere much like a meteoroid would.

These objects come from space missions designed to transport physical extraterrestrial samples from outer space to Earth. Because of this similarity to meteoroids in entry, we often refer to these sample return capsules, or SRCs, as "artificial meteors." Advertisement

Over 80 researchers from more than a dozen institutions recently worked together to study such an "artificial meteor" -- NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule -- as it reentered Earth's atmosphere.

To capture signals, we installed many sensitive microphones and other instruments in key locations close to the SRC's flight path.

NASA launched the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx , mission on Sept. 8, 2016. It traveled to Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid , and collected a sample from its surface in October of 2020.