"Asteroid Sampling"

This. Is. Cool!:

NASA Lands Spacecraft on Asteroid](https://www.dailywire.com/news/nasa-lands-spacecraft-on-asteroid-traveling-63000-mph-to-collect-samples)

[PS (the concluding line from the article): “With samples collected, the van-sized spacecraft will now return to earth and will be back in 2023.” Love it.]

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Awesome. The technology involved in navigating to and maneuvering around small objects like asteroids with little gravitational field is sensational. I was working at Ball Aerospace at the time the Deep Impact mission made its rendezvous with comet Tempel 1. The instrumentation and algorithms that were developed to successfully navigate the vehicle to a moving small target were derived from military programs. OSIRIS-REx benefits from the technology proven by pathfinder missions like Deep Impact.

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It is incredibly cool. I first heard of this mission only a couple of months ago. Astounding.

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The navigational challenge is off the charts, crazy difficult. Asteroids rotate and have an irregular shape. So to get a lander on the surface the vehicle has to be maneuvered in an intricate dance that orients it for touchdown. I can tell you, back when, we were watching real time at Ball when Deep Impact successfully hit Tempel 1 with the impactor. The room erupted in cheers. And THAT wasn’t even a lander mission.

Hos is this done? Are their sensors on the lander? Are control signals sent to the lander in response to data received from the lander? (Is not the time delay alone an added challenge?)

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Beyond a certain point in descent to the surface it will be all on-board sensors. The maneuvers to put the vehicle in the right attitude are based on a ton of orbital mechanics modeling and simulation to program the thruster burns and torquers. No doubt with fine tuning by ground command if necessary based, again, on on-board sensors. I have no doubt Bennu was imaged on approach to fine tune the orbital dynamics modeling, in particular its morphology and rotational state. Something similar was done with Deep Impact during approach, but that was tougher because instruments had to image through the dust of the coma. A comet boils off an amazing amount of debris embedded with the gas due to exposure to the sun. In some respects Bennu will have been more straight forward to image for update of the modeling.

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Great stuff. A most interesting thread. Thanks!

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Thanks!

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What impresses me most is the communication between probe and ground station. This involves signals which are well below background noise level, but can still be identified, extracted and the data recovered accurately. It puts concerns about corruption across different types of Ethernet cable into perspective.

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This is amazing. I did not know this.

Resolution below the noise level.

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I shall try to remember where I read about it. It was an incidental in a technical description about something else, Not in some ‘Boys introduction to Space’ type article unfortunately.

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So, a small hand comes out of the probe and grabs a handful of dirt.

Is it considered “digital sampling”? :upside_down_face:

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