NASA completed the ship to hunt for meteors

Scientists from the US Aeronautics Agency (NASA) have made new strides on the meteorite hunt when completing the first spacecraft designed to bring meteorite specimens back to Earth.

OSIRIS-REx meteorite ship prepared a test flight

According to NASA, the spacecraft designed to catch a meteorite and vacuum on its surface is ready for the test flight.

In the October 21 announcement, Lockheed Martin said its engineers had completed the assembly of spacecraft to conduct meteorite sampling for the first time. The US aerospace company will test the OSIRIS-REx to ensure it can withstand vibration when launching missiles and successfully performs a flight into space.

"This is an exciting time in the program, because we have completed the spacecraft and the whole team will test it before controlling it to the meteorite Bennu " , The Christian Science Monitor quoted Rich Kuhns, manager OSIRIS-REx program at Lockheed Martin.

The OSIRIS-REx is ready to take meteorite specimens.(Artwork: NASA).

According to Erin Morton, a scientist at the University of Arizona, who led the research, experiments aimed at testing the stamina of OSIRIS-REx. The ship will be rotated to simulate the launch process, the most intense part of the project. Tests also put OSIRIS-REx vessels under hot and cold temperatures at the same time, to simulate when one side of the ship faces the Sun in the universe.

After 5 months of testing at a facility in Denver, Colorado, USA, OSIRIS-REx will depart in September 2016 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Morton said, OSIRIS-REx will approach the Bennu meteorite, chosen by scientists by the carbon-rich surface to understand how life begins in the solar system.

The OSIRIS-REx will not land on a meteorite, but uses a mosquito-like probe to collect specimens."We expect to contact the meteorite for about 5 seconds and suck a part of it ," Morton said.

Engineers also plan to welcome OSIRIS-REx back to Earth after it flies around the Sun and returns to the specimen. The team can use the results from the project in the next tasks with meteorites.

NASA's Project of Changing Meteorites in the early 2020s aims to use a robot-controlled spacecraft to capture a meteorite and put it in orbit around the Moon. This meteorite will help NASA develop new technologies such as specimen collection, meeting, approaching and mass transfer.

Not only contributing to answering questions about the origin of the solar system, OSIRIS-REx also helps to upgrade defensive techniques to detect dangerous meteorites and protect the Earth in the future. NASA wants to build a system that changes the meteor's route if it is large in size and potentially harmful when flying too close to Earth.