X Marks the Spot: How to Successfully Sample an Asteroid

I’m Kenny Getzandanner, the Flight Dynamics Manager for the OSIRIS- REx mission from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. For the past two years, we’ve been looking very closely at Bennu learning as much as we can about our asteroid. And just as importantly, learning to operate and navigate the spacecraft in the unique small body environment, and now we’re finally ready to go for TAG. Tomorrow, the spacecraft will execute a series of three maneuvers which will take it out of its orbit and initiate a slow descent to the surface eventually ending up inside of Nightingale crater. We have one more opportunity to update those maneuver designs and that process is going on now We’ve received images from the spacecraft the navigation team has processed them compared them with high fidelity terrain models that we have on hand we’re able to very precisely predict where the spacecraft is right now, but more importantly where it’s going to be at the time of the departure maneuver we take that information we’re updating the maneuver designs as we speak along with some other input products to the onboard guidance system And we’ll hand that off to the spacecraft team which will build the commands, uplink them to the spacecraft just in time to execute TAG tomorrow. .