[arcade game sounds,lasers shooting]
I grew up playing video games about shooting
lasers at asteroids, and now it’s my job to shoot
lasers at asteroids. It never stops amazing me.
[music]
My name is Tim Haltigin from the Canadian
Space Agency, and I’m the Canadian Mission Manager on
OSIRIS-REx. I’m responsible for the overall operations of the
OLA instrument and also for coordinating the contributions
of the Canadian Science Team. So OSIRIS-REx is an international
collaboration led by NASA that
is a mission to go to an
asteroid named Bennu, capture a sample of it, and bring it back
to Earth so we can understand a little bit more what it’s made
of. Understanding the shape of asteroid Bennu is going to be
absolutely fundamental to understanding the geology and
putting it in context. The other reason you really need to
understand the topography extremely well is that when
we’re going in to take a sample, it’s a very very fine
measurement. And so if you’re coming in, you’ve got the
sampling head at the end of this arm that has to come in
perfectly square to the surface.
If you don’t understand shape at
sort of a 30-centimeter scale, you’re not going to be able to
collect a sample. So OLA, or the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter, is
an instrument on the spacecraft that has two lasers inside of
it, and it acts sort of like a 3D scanner. OLA’s going to
create a three-dimensional map of the entire asteroid Bennu at
a resolution of about one point every seven centimeters. This
operates very similar to a radar, however instead of using
a radio wave, it uses light. And so by measuring very accurately
how long it takes for that laser pulse to go out, and bounce off
a surface, and come back, you can measure a very accurate
distance away from the spacecraft. The reason we have
two different lasers is that we have to measure the asteroid
from different distances away from it. So the high-powered
laser, we can use from about seven kilometers in to about one
kilometer away from the asteroid. The low-energy laser
we can then use from one kilometer and inwards. And so as
we get in closer and closer to the asteroid, we can make a lot
higher-resolution maps and understand the shape of certain
regions even better. The Canadian Space Agency
contributed OLA to this mission for a number of reasons. First
is that it allows Canadian
scientists to have access to
astromaterials for the very first time. So these are the
first samples that are coming back on a sample return mission
that Canada is going to own a portion of. The second reason is
that it really highlights the expertise of Canadian scientists
and engineers, and so the ability to contribute something
like this to a mission as exciting as OSIRIS-REx really
means a lot to the Agency and to Canada. If you ask anyone that’s
ever built a flight instrument for space, they’ll tell you all
kinds of fun stories about the challenges they’ve had doing it.
When you’re building an instrument, you have an original
design, you build a prototype, and you test it. What you want
to do is something called “test as you fly.” Flying an
instrument in space, space is a horrible place. So with flight
instruments, what you need to do is put them on a table and shake
them really hard to make sure they’re going to be able to
survive the launch. You need to bombard them with radiation to
make sure your electronics are still going to work. You need to
put them in a chamber and completely evacuate it to make
sure that everything still works when you’re in a vacuum. In the
end ultimately what you have is an extremely robust system that
you’re confident that when you strap it to the side of the
spacecraft, launch it, and fire it in space, it’s going to work
beautifully. I am incredibly excited to actually see what
this asteroid looks like. When we get there and we see the
first images and generate that first shape model, I think it’s
going to surprise everyone.
[music]