OSIRIS-APEX emerged “safely” at its closest point to our Sun on January 2, scientists announced on Tuesday (May 28).
Originally known probe Osiris-RExIt has completed its sample return mission to asteroid Bennu and is now heading to the space rock. Apophis We’re on an expanded mission. The new mission will require OSIRIS-APEX to glide 40 million kilometers (25 million miles) closer to the Sun than it should. designed to work. Scientists believe the probe will need several close passes to reach Apophis in 2029.
OSIRIS-APEX is in an elliptical orbit around our Sun, reaching its closest point to the star every nine months. The first such close approach To prepare for the intense radiation blast, in early December the mission team installed one of OSIRIS-APEX’s two solar panels. It obscured the probe’s most sensitive instruments.The second panel points toward the sun to power the spacecraft.
Related: How will NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission help protect Earth from asteroid Bennu and its flyby in 2182?
This creative engineering protected the spacecraft while it came dangerously close to the sun, just as computer simulations had previously predicted, the mission team shared this week. NASA statement.
“It’s amazing how well our spacecraft configuration protected OSIRIS-APEX, so I’m really encouraged by this first perihelion pass,” said Ron Mink, OSIRIS-APEX mission system engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. said.
Telemetry data downloaded from the spacecraft in mid-March gave scientists assurances that the spacecraft was healthy. By early April, the probe was far enough from the sun to resume normal operations, according to a statement from NASA.
Scientists and engineers were also pleasantly surprised to find that the onboard cameras performed much better than expected after being exposed to high temperatures during the encounter. MapCam, a mid-range camera that previously mapped Bennu in color and plans to map Apophis in the future, has seen a 70% reduction in pesky white spots, called hot pixels, since the camera was last tested in April of last year.
Hot pixels are caused by prolonged exposure to solar radiation and are a common problem in space cameras. Controlling heat using onboard heaters would normally solve the problem, but OSIRIS-APEX’s cameras naturally recovered thanks to a heat surge caused by a close encounter with the sun, the scientists said.
Mission team members were relieved that OSIRIS-APEX was safe after its first close approach to the Sun, but noted that it was unclear what effect these five encounters would have on the probe and its instruments.
The next closest approach to the Sun is scheduled for September 1, when the spacecraft will once again pass within 74.8 million kilometers (46.5 million miles) of the Sun’s surface, within the orbit of Venus and well beyond the probe’s originally planned operational limits. . .
