The OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft and the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM)

Space Sci Rev (2018) 214:107 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-018-0521-6 The OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft and the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) E.B. Bierhaus1 · B.C. Clark1 · J.W. Harris1 · K.S. Payne1 · R.D. Dubisher1 · D.W. Wurts1 · R.A. Hund1 · R.M. Kuhns1 · T.M. Linn1 · J.L. Wood1 · A.J. May1 · J.P. Dworkin2 · E. Beshore3 · D.S. Lauretta3 · the OSIRIS-REx Team Received: 1 April 2017 / Accepted: 28 June 2018 © The Author(s) 2018 Abstract The Origins, Spectral-Interpretation, Resource-Identification, Security and Regolith-Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft supports all aspects of the mission science objectives, from extensive remote sensing at the asteroid Bennu, to sample collection and return to Earth. In general, the success of planetary missions requires the collection, return, and analysis of data, which in turn depends on the successful operation of instruments and the host spacecraft. In the case of OSIRIS-REx, a sample-return mission, the spacecraft must also support the acquisition, safe stowage, and return of the sample. The target asteroid is Bennu, a B-class near-Earth asteroid roughly 500 m diameter. The Lockheed Martin-designed and developed OSIRIS-REx spacecraft draws significant heritage from previous missions and features the Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism, or TAGSAM, to collect sample from the surface of Bennu. Lockheed Martin developed TAGSAM as a novel, simple way to collect samples on planetary bodies. During short contact with the asteroid surface, TAGSAM releases curation-grade nitrogen gas, mobilizing the surface regolith into a collection chamber. The contact surface of TAGSAM includes “contact pads”, which are present to collect surface grains that have been subject to space weathering. Extensive 1-g laboratory testing, “reduced-gravity” testing (via parabolic flights on an airplane), and analysis demonstrate that TAGSAM will collect asteroid material in nominal conditions, and a variety of off-nominal conditions, such as the presence of large obstacles under the TAGSAM sampling head, or failure in the sampling gas firing. TAGSAM, and the spacecraft support of the instruments, are central to the success of the mission. Keywords OSIRIS-REx · Bennu · Asteroid · TAGSAM · Spacecraft OSIRIS-REx Edited by Dante Lauretta and Christopher T. Russell B.C. Clark, R.A. Hund and E. Beshore are retired. B E.B. Bierhaus 1 Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Littleton, CO, USA 2 NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA 3 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA 107 Page 2 of 46 E.B. Bierhaus et al. Acronyms ACS Attitude Control System ASC Advanced Scientific Concepts EDU Engineering Development Unit EGA Earth-Gravity Assist FOV Field of View GN&C Guidance Navigation and Control HGA High Gain Antenna IRAD Internal Research and Development LM Lockheed Martin LGA Low-Gain Antenna MAVEN Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution MGA Medium Gain Antenna MLI Multi-Layer Insulation MRO Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter NFT Natural Feature Tracking OCAMS OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite OLA OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter OSIRIS-REx Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer OTES OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer OVIRS OSIRIS-REx Visible and near-IR Spectrometer PHS Plastic Hollow Spheres PI Principal Investigator PICA Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator REXIS Regolith X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer RGO Reduced-Gravity Office SARA Sample Acquisition and Retention Assembly SFD Size-Frequency Distribution SLA Super-Light Ablator SRC Sample Return Capsule TAG Touch And Go TAGSAM Touch-And-Go Sample-Acquisition Mechanism TCM Trajectory Correction Maneuver TLS Tagish Lake Simulant T-VAC Thermal-Vacuum [in reference to Thermal-Vacuum testing] TWTA Traveling Wave Tube Amplifiers UTTR Utah Test and Training Range 1 Introduction OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral-Interpretation, Resource-Identification, Security and Regolith-Explorer) is NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, selected as the third mission in the New Frontiers program (after New Horizons to Pluto and Juno to Jupiter). New Frontiers is a competitively selected, cost-capped, and Principal Investigator (PI) led program of solar system exploration missions managed by NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center. OSIRIS-REx will travel to the approximately 500-meter-diameter (Nolan et al. 2013) B-class asteroid Bennu, believed to be carbonaceous rich (Clark et al. 2011), and will return The OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft and the Touch-and-Go Sample. . . Page 3 of 46 107 at least 150 g of sample from Bennu to Earth (Lauretta et al. 2017). Dante Lauretta (Univ. of Arizona) is the PI, and the mission is managed by NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. Lockheed Martin designed and built the spacecraft, sampling system, and sample return capsule (SRC), and will operate the mission from its facilities in Littleton, Colorado. The mission incorporates four science payloads, a student experiment, and measurements of the asteroid gravity derived from the spacecraft communications system. The instruments include the OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite (OCAMS), a visible-light suite of three cameras provided by the University of Arizona (Rizk et al. 2017); the OSIRIS-REx Visible and nearIR Spectrometer (OVIRS), a point-spectrometer covering wavelengths from 0.4 to 4.3 µm, provided by NASA Goddard (Reuter et al. 2017); the OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer (OTES), a point thermal spectrometer covering wavelengths from 5 to 50 µm, provided by Arizona State University (Christensen et al. 2017); the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter (OLA), a scanning lidar contributed by the Canadian Space Agency, provided by MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates and York University (Daly et al. 2017); REXIS (Regolith X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer), a student experiment (Masterson et al. 2018), jointly implemented between MIT and Harvard, that conducts coded-aperture imaging for X-ray photons in the 0.5–7.5 keV range; and the “radio-science experiment,” which uses the X-band communications system to measure Bennu’s gravitational field (McMahon et al. 2017). In addition to the science instruments, the mission utilizes a Touch-and-Go Sample-Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) to collect the asteroid sample. On September 8, 2016, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was carried into space on an Atlas V411 launch vehicle in the first second of the launch window for the day. Cruise to the asteroid will last about two years, and includes an Earth gravity assist on September 22, 2017. Asteroid operations, including the asteroid approach phase, start in late 2018 and culminate in sample collection in July 2020. The spacecraft can depart the asteroid as early as March 2021 and returns the sample to Earth in September 2023. This paper describes the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and the sampling system. In Sect. 2, we summarize the scientific and engineering requirements, which provide the basis to understand the subs (...truncated)