美宇航局将开展小行星取样任务

A newly announced NASA mission to collect a sample of an asteroid¹（小行星） and return it to Earth will include an instrument built at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE). The ASU instrument will analyze² long-wavelength infrared³ light emitted from the asteroid to map the minerals on its surface. The device is a modified version of the highly successful miniature infrared spectrometers（红外光谱仪） carried on Spirit and Opportunity, NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers. The new asteroid sample-return mission is called OSIRIS-REx, an acronym⁴（首字母缩略词） standing⁵ for Origins, Spectral⁶ Interpretation⁷, Resource Identification, Security, and Regolith（风化层） EXplorer. The Principal Investigator⁸ for the mission is Michael Drake of the University of Arizona in Tucson, and the mission is part of NASA's New Frontiers program.

The mission's goals are to return a sample of rocks, soil, and dust from a pristine⁹（原始的，淳朴的） carbonaceous asteroid, map the asteroid's global properties down to submillimeter scales, characterize this class of asteroid for comparison with meteorites¹⁰, and measure a subtle effect of sunlight that can alter the orbits of asteroids¹¹.

"The OSIRIS-REx mission is an important milestone¹² for planetary science in the state of Arizona," says Kip Hodges, director of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration. "I am very excited at the prospects¹³ of building closer research collaborations with our friends and colleagues at the University of Arizona."

The instrument to be built at ASU is the OSIRIS-REx Thermal¹⁴ Emission¹⁵ Spectrometer, or OTES for short. It will be the first complex electro-optical instrument for spaceflight to be built at ASU.