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 asteroid（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 analyze long-wavelength infrared 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 acronym（首字母缩略词） standing for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, and Regolith（风化层） EXplorer. The Principal Investigator 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 pristine（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 meteorites, and measure a subtle effect of sunlight that can alter the orbits of asteroids.

"The OSIRIS-REx mission is an important milestone 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 prospects 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 Thermal Emission Spectrometer, or OTES for short. It will be the first complex electro-optical instrument for spaceflight to be built at ASU.