In May of 2011, NASA selected the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) asteroid sample return mission as the third mission in the New Frontiers program. The other two New Frontiers missions are New Horizons, which explored Pluto during a flyby in July 2015 and is on its way for a flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019, and Juno, an orbiting mission that is studying the origin, evolution, and internal structure of Jupiter. The spacecraft departed for near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu aboard an United Launch Alliance Atlas V 411 evolved expendable launch vehicle at 7:05 p.m. EDT on September 8, 2016, on a seven-year journey to return samples from Bennu. The spacecraft is on an outbound-cruise trajectory that will result in a rendezvous with Bennu in August 2018. The science instruments on the spacecraft will survey Bennu to measure its physical, geological, and chemical properties, and the team will use these data to select a site on the surface to collect at least 60 g of asteroid regolith. The team will also analyze the remote-sensing data to perform a detailed study of the sample site for context, assess Bennus resource potential, refine estimates of its impact probability with Earth, and provide ground-truth data for the extensive astronomical data set collected on this asteroid. The spacecraft will leave Bennu in 2021 and return the sample to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) on September 24, 2023.Comment: 89 pages, 39 figures, submitted to Space Science Reviews - OSIRIS-REx special issu

No abstract

Abstract-Available evidence strongly suggests that the HED (howardite, eucrite, diogenite) meteorites are samples of asteroid 4 Vesta. Abundances of the moderately siderophile elements (Ni, Co, Mo, W and P) in the HED mantle indicate that the parent body may have been completely molten during its early history. Duriig cooling of a chondritic composition magma ocean, equilibrium crystallization is fostered by the suspension of crystals in a convecting magma ocean until the crystal fraction reaches a critical value near 0.80, when the convective system freezes and melts segregate from crystals by gravitational forces. The extruded liquids are similar in composition to Main Group and Stannern trend eucrites, and the last pyroxenes to precipitate out of this ocean (before convective lockup) span the compositional range of the diogenites. Subsequent fractional crystallization of a Main Group eucrite liquid, which has been isolated as a body of magma, produces the Nuevo Laredo trend and the cumulate eucrites. The predicted cumulate mineral compositions are in close agreement with phase compositions analyzed in the cumulate eucrites. Thus, eucrites and diogenites are shown to have formed as part of a simple and continuous crystallization sequence starting with a magma ocean environment on an asteroidal size parent body that is consistent with Vesta.

A long-standing question in the planetary sciences asks what the Earth is made of. For historical reasons, volatile-depleted primitive materials similar to current chondritic meteorites were long considered to provide the 'building blocks' of the terrestrial planets. But material from the Earth, Mars, comets and various meteorites have Mg/Si and Al/Si ratios, oxygen-isotope ratios, osmium-isotope ratios and D/H, Ar/H2O and Kr/Xe ratios such that no primitive material similar to the Earth's mantle is currently represented in our meteorite collections. The 'building blocks' of the Earth must instead be composed of unsampled 'Earth chondrite' or 'Earth achondrite'.