The project has been proceeding in essentially three streams.
It launched with an incredible endowment of more than US$100 million from Irvine Company Chairman Donald Bren back in 2013 – a donation that has only recently been disclosed – and was boosted to the tune of US$17.5 million by Northrop Grumman in 2015. Undeterred, and indeed energized by the challenge, a team at Caltech has been working on the Space Solar Power Project for nearly a decade now. The scale of a worthwhile space solar installation is mind-boggling, and unprecedented problems present enormous hurdles at every step of the journey. The costs involved in launching, assembling and maintaining equipment in space are astronomical. The problem has always been how you'd do it – and indeed, how much it'll cost. The energy potential in space is some eight times better per square meter of solar panel than here on Earth. It's obvious why you'd want to harvest solar energy in space: 24-hour access to virtually limitless solar energy without so much as an atmosphere in the way, let alone weather or obstructions. These cutting-edge ultralight structures will collect, convert and wirelessly send energy. Scientists also hope to learn more about Bennu because the ancient asteroid could be on a trajectory to reach Earth sometime in the 2100s.Caltech's wildly ambitious space solar project, buoyed by a massive hundred-million-dollar donation, is preparing to launch its first prototypes into orbit. Rocks on Earth have experienced billions of years of erosion and changes from rain and tectonic plate shifting, but Bennu soil exists in the vacuum of space. Similar to Moon soil returns that are still being studied in labs, scientists will be able to study the 4.5 billion-year-old rock and potentially learn more about the origin of our solar system. OSIRIS-REx will make history as the first American spacecraft to collect and return asteroid samples to Earth. NASA will reattempt to capture a soil sample from Bennu in the coming weeks if today’s first attempt is determined to be unsuccessful. If successful, OSIRIS-REx will drop a capsule containing ancient rock samples in the desert of west Utah in 2023. The space agency expects to know how the first attempt went within a week based on measuring changes in the mass of the spacecraft’s payload. ET live coverage from NASA starts at 5 p.m. The first attempt is scheduled to occur on Tuesday afternoon at 6:12 p.m. Instead, OSIRIS-REx will extend an arm that barely touches the surface to “Touch And Go,” or TAG, and collect rocks before returning to Earth. OSIRIS-REx began its seven-year mission in 2016 with a goal of capturing an ancient soil sample from the surface of Bennu on October 20, 2020. OSIRIS-REx is no dinosaur - it stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer - but its destination is a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid named Bennu. NASA launched its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on a ULA Atlas V rocket four years ago.
The team is busy analyzing what's likely to be NASA's 1st asteroid sample: /2pnDsfjsPy- Thomas Zurbuchen October 21, 2020 Yesterday, captured these pics showing the spacecraft touch Bennu, press into its surface & stir up material. 🚨Never-before-seen images from our journey #ToBennuAndBack
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