LAUREL, Md., March 13 NASA has started detailed planning to obtain a sample of organic material from a small asteroid named RQ36 that regularly crosses Earth's orbit.
It's a treasure trove of organic material, so it holds clues to how Earth formed and life got started, said Joseph Nuth of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ' s Goddard Space Flight Center in Laurel, Md. Nuth is the project scientist for the proposed OSIRIS mission that will be the first to return a sample of an asteroid to Earth. He said OSIRIS will launch in 2011, acquire a sample from RQ36 in 2013 and return to Earth in 2017, NASA said.
OSIRIS will return 150 grams -- about 5 ounces, said Jason Dworkin, a co-investigator on the OSIRIS project. We'll take it apart almost atom by atom. It will keep a lot of people busy for a long time.
Copyright 2007 by UPI
