"Mike believed that the best research department should also be the best teaching department," Swindle said. Swindle estimates that more than 100 UA students have been involved in various aspects of OSIRIS-REx to date, and about two dozen UA graduate students are in Florida to watch the launch. Drake Building - north of the UA campus.ĭrake's aggressive approach to science may have been matched only by his enthusiastic encouragement of the next generation of scientists. The cost of that mission was less than half of the billion-dollar OSIRIS-REx, which will bring scientists from all over the world to the former Science Operations Center - now the Michael J. The mission was considered done in November 2008, its experiments and observations completed. "Mike was smart enough to figure out that this would be a long, multigenerational mission," Swindle said, adding that training has been essential.īy comparison, the UA-led Phoenix Mars Lander mission launched in August 2007 and reached the Red Planet in less than a year. Over that seven-year period, a certain amount of turnover in personnel is expected - and yet the mission must remain on course. Finally, in September 2023, the sample return capsule is expected to land in the Utah desert, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City. The spacecraft won't get to the asteroid until late in the summer of 2018, and it won't attempt a sample until two years after that. In addition to the challenge of carefully plucking at least 60 grams (2 ounces) of surface material from the asteroid Bennu, the mission is risky because of its sheer length. It's too bad he's not around to play with those things himself." This is a really bold idea, to have the building blocks of the solar system in your hands. "He was a lab guy, a hands-on geochemist who felt that nothing compared with bringing samples back from a space mission. "We're realizing that we're here because Mike's vision for OSIRIS-REx came together. "We're a tight-knit group," said Jani Radebaugh, who received her doctorate in planetary science in 2005 from the UA and is now an associate professor of geological sciences at Brigham Young University.
"This was a mission that could go after at least a chunk of that."Īs Swindle and others from LPL - past and present - gathered for a reunion at a Cocoa Beach hotel on the eve of the launch, Drake's profound influence on space science - and on them - was a popular topic of conversation. But nothing captured his imagination quite like an asteroid sample return mission, which he thought would reveal significant clues to the origin of the solar system and the beginnings of life itself.ĭrake was "curious about the big questions, the questions like 'How did Earth get its water?' and 'How did it get its organic molecules?'" said Tim Swindle, who succeeded Drake as director of the UA's renowned Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
In his 38-year tenure at the University of Arizona, the English-born Drake studied lunar rocks, meteors and the moons of Saturn. MST on Thursday, and the weather forecast is favorable for a successful launch. mission to send a robotic spacecraft to retrieve a sample from a primitive carbonaceous asteroid. The OSIRIS-REx mission, conceived by Drake 12 years ago and finally green-lighted by NASA only four months before his death in 2011, is the first U.S. The embodiment of the late Michael Drake's biggest questions about the universe stood silently in coastal Florida's sunshine on Wednesday, nearly ready for a seven-year odyssey that will be something of an extraterrestrial high-wire act.Ī sleek Atlas V 411 rocket, topped by a Lockheed Martin spacecraft, was slowly rolled out in midmorning from United Launch Alliance's Vertical Integration Facility - a space-age hangar - to Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The Atlas V rocket carrying the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was rolled out Wednesday morning from the Vertical Integration Facility to Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.ĬAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
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