NASA had delayed the launch of the initial phase of its new space mission dubbed Artemis I for several years. In September this year, the allegedly independent space agency of the U.S. federal government said it would no longer attempt to launch the mission. There have been a number of technical issues that have prolonged a decision on the timing of the next launch attempt.

[NASA is a part of the federal government. It is not independent in the sense that a private company is independent. However, the NASA administrator alleges it doesn’t report to any other federal agency]

The space rocket mission finally blasted off from Florida for a three-week test journey without a crew, which inaugurated the U.S. space agency’s program, 50 years after Washington’s last moon mission.

Even the official launch on Wednesday faced problems, with the technical team scrambling out to the launch pad in the final hours of the countdown to avoid a potential fuel leak.

More than a decade in development with budget overruns, a recent audit found that $40 billion of American taxpayer’s money has already been spent on the program, including design, construction, testing, and ground facilities.

NASA’s Office of Inspector General has said the total costs will cost at least $93 billion of American taxpayer’s money by 2025.

Critics have slammed the price tag for a space program to try and eventually reach the moon during extremely difficult economic times for Americans with record inflation levels.

This is while the U.S. poverty rate climbed for a second straight year in 2021, rising to 11.6% from 11.5% in the prior year. That’s according to annual data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Last year, almost 40 million Americans were living in poverty, about 3.9 million more than in 2019. Complete data for 2022 has yet to be released but amid a rising cost of living crisis, the rate is expected to rise even further.

There has been a continuing spike in monthly poverty rates since December 2021’s monthly poverty rate of 12.5 percent. In January 2022, the monthly poverty rate remained elevated at 14.7 percent.

In January this year, child poverty stood at 17 percent. That represented a continuation of the sharp increase in child poverty from December 2021, when the monthly child poverty rate was 12.1 percent.

In 2020, more than 37 million Americans lived in poverty according to data from the U.S Census Bureau. That’s 3.3 million more than in 2019, which means the rates are rising on an annual basis and so expected to expand by 2025 when NASA’s total costs for its space program will reach at least $93 billion.

But the poverty data above does not include those who are above the poverty line and struggling to make a living. According to the Poor People’s Campaign, once low-income families are accounted for, the number of Americans struggling to make ends meet is closer to 140 million U.S. citizens.

According to Feeding America (a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks that feed more than 46 million people), there are 34 million people in the U.S., including 9 million children, who are facing food insecurity.

Other estimates suggest that more than 46 million Americans, including 13 million children and 7 million seniors rely on food pantries and meal programs to feed themselves.

The organization’s network of food banks is reporting a 90% increase or sustained need over the last month. The food banks themselves are facing mounting challenges with food donations on the decline and costs rising for freight, food purchase, and every other aspect of operations to feed the hungry. There has been a spike in online searches for food support, but more than ever before, Americans are making searches around “food” and “prices” in 2022, with searches rising 45% since last year.

A recent survey from Feeding America, a nonprofit network of 200 food banks, found that 155 food pantries reported a jump in families coming to their door.

“People coming through and they’re not just getting for their family, but they might have a sister or a brother they’re getting a little bit extra for,” Tehma Smith Wilson, who runs a food pantry in Baltimore, told CBS News.

The increase in people seeking help from food banks is also taxing pantries’ own resources. In the past, Wilson said her pantry typically received 700 boxes of food to donate; that number is now around 100

Grocery store prices have also jumped, along with the high cost of gas and other staples, which are forcing households to change the way they shop for food.

In 2020 it was estimated that around 12 million children in America were living in poverty, a burden that has disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic children, as well as those living in rural areas. Then COVID and a global economic crisis as a result of the Ukraine war forced even more parents out of work. Today, the number of children living in poverty in America is believed to be closer to 13 million.

However, poverty in America disproportionately affects black and Hispanic kids. In Maryland, Hispanic and Black families are almost 4 times as likely to face hunger compared to white families. Below are just some of the statistics.

Hispanic families are disadvantaged in New York, where 38% do not have enough food, compared to 11% of white families.

In Washington, D.C., Black families are 6 times as likely to struggle to pay bills as white families.

Nationwide, 28% of Black households, and 24% of Hispanic households that rent, are behind on their payments, compared to 12% of white households.

Also across the U.S., the country’s poorer families are worse off in comparison with the group of other high-economy countries such as poorer families residing in the European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia, and so on. In comparing poverty in the U.S. to these countries, American poverty is both more prevalent and more extreme.

The increase in food insecurity is linked to inflation with higher prices for housing, gas, and especially food. According to the last report on consumer prices, the cost of food increased 10.4 percent from a year earlier, the largest 12-month increase since 1981.

Data from the Census Bureau this year also shows that 25 million adults sometimes had not had enough to eat over the previous seven days. That was the greatest number since just before Christmas in 2020 when the pandemic continued to take a high economic toll and the unemployment rate was nearly twice what it is today.

While NASA describes its new mission as historic and a majestic launch that will see a new era of human deep space exploration and eventually put a man on the moon, critics argue otherwise.

After keeping silent on the costs for a long time, in January this year, a senior NASA official said the space agency would like to get its operational costs for a single mission a year down to $2 billion or less. Another source at the time said the internal goal was $1.5 billion. That has now reached a total of $93 billion and may rise further or fail to achieve its operational targets.

NASA is using taxpayer’s money to buy technology and also collaborate with several companies; leading them is Lockheed Martin, America’s top arms manufacturer. The program will see lucrative profits for a limited number of individuals in the U.S., at the expense of $93 billion of hardworking American taxpayer’s money.

A quick search online suggests Americans would rather see their tax being used for other initiatives such as helping the growing number of households facing financial hardship or improving the country’s crippling infrastructure.

There is also speculation that the costly mission is not entirely peaceful in nature and may well have a secret military aspect attached to it.

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While there has been lots of evidence for the presence of water on the moon, these “cold traps” were previously thought to be restricted to deep, kilometers-wide craters. However, the team found that there are also micro-cold traps – areas at the meter and millimeter scale that are permanently shadowed and so could contain more accessible ice. Altogether, the researchers estimate that cold traps occupy about 40,000 square kilometers, or roughly 0.1 per cent of the moon’s surface.

“NASA Confirms water on the Moon”

A separate study has additionally confirmed the presence of water ice (H₂O) rather than hydroxyl (OH), which previous observations were unable to distinguish between. Casey Honniball at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and her colleagues used the agency’s SOFIA telescope, which is mounted on a plane to get a clearer view through Earth’s atmosphere, to spot a spectral signature that is unique to water. “I screamed in excitement,” says Honniball.

Honniball says the readings are consistent with the presence of individual water molecules incorporated in grains within the lunar surface. “This form of water is expected to be widespread on the surface,” she says.

“NASA Confirms water on the Moon”

“Water is central to human life but is expensive to launch into space,” says Honniball. “Finding water on the moon may mean we can utilize the water that is there versus bringing the water with us.”

But it still isn’t clear how stable water in this form is over long periods, says William Bottke at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. “Astronauts might also have great difficulty extracting this water,” he says. “For example, to fill up a bottle, the astronauts might need to process thousands of kilograms of rocks.”

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center at 3:22 p.m. EDT, launching Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on a 19-hour ride aboard the company’s newly designed Crew Dragon capsule bound for the International Space Station, Reuters reported.

Just before liftoff, Hurley said, “SpaceX, we’re going for launch. Let’s light this candle,” paraphrasing the famous comment uttered on the launch pad in 1961 by Alan Shepard, the first American flown into space.

Minutes after launch, the first-stage booster rocket of the Falcon 9 separated from the upper second-stage rocket and flew itself back to Earth to descend safely onto a landing platform floating in the Atlantic.

High above the Earth, the Crew Dragon jettisoned moments later from the second-stage rocket, sending the capsule on its way to the space station.

The exhilarating spectacle of the rocket soaring flawlessly into the heavens came as a welcome triumph for a nation gripped by racially-charged civil unrest as well as ongoing fear and economic upheaval from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Falcon 9 took off from the same launch pad used by NASA’s final space shuttle flight, piloted by Hurley, in 2011. Since then, NASA astronauts have had to hitch rides into orbit aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

“It’s incredible, the power, the technology,” said US President Donald Trump, who was at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida for the launch. “That was a beautiful sight to see.”

The mission’s first launch attempt on Wednesday was called off with less than 17 minutes remaining on the countdown clock. Weather again threatened Saturday’s launch but cleared in time to proceed with the mission.

NASA chief Jim Bridenstine has said resuming launches of American astronauts on American-made rockets from US soil is the space agency’s top priority.

“I’m breathing a sigh of relief, but I will also tell you I’m not gonna celebrate until Bob and Doug are home safely,” Bridenstine said.

For Musk, the launch represents another milestone for the reusable rockets his company pioneered to make spaceflight less costly and more frequent. And it marks the first time commercially developed space vehicles — owned and operated by a private entity rather than NASA — have carried Americans into orbit.

The last time NASA launched astronauts into space aboard a brand new vehicle was 40 years ago at the start of the space shuttle program.

Musk, the South African-born high-tech entrepreneur who made his fortune in Silicon Valley, is also chief executive of the electric carmaker and battery manufacturer Tesla Inc. He founded Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies, in 2002.

Hurley, 53, and Behnken, 49, NASA employees under contract to fly with SpaceX, are expected to remain at the space station for several weeks, assisting a short-handed crew aboard the orbital laboratory.

Boeing Co, producing its own launch system in competition with SpaceX, is expected to fly its CST-100 Starliner vehicle with astronauts aboard for the first time next year. NASA has awarded nearly $8 billion combined to SpaceX and Boeing for the development of their rival rockets.

Trump also hailed the launch as a major advance toward the goal of eventually sending humans to Mars.

He was joined at the viewing by Musk, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, and Senator Rick Scott.

Earlier on Saturday, the crew bid goodbye to their families. Prior to climbing into a specially designed Tesla automobile for the ride to the launch site, Behnken told his young son, “Be good for mom. Make her life easy.”

During the drive, Behnken and Hurley passed former astronaut Garrett Reisman who held a sign saying, “Take me with you.”

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New research led by the Takeshi Horinouchi of Hokkaido University has revealed that the super-rotation of Venus’ atmosphere is maintained near the equator by atmospheric tidal waves that have formed due to solar cooling on the planet’s nightside and heating on its dayside. However, the atmospheric turbulence and other various waves have a more strong effect, Techtimes reported.

This increases with altitude and takes only four earth days to rotate around the entire planet onto the top of the cloud cover.

Because of this super-rotation, the fast-moving atmosphere is forced to transport heat from Venus’ dayside to nightside which reduces the temperature differences between both hemispheres.

Horinouchi has said that “Since the super-rotation was discovered in the 1960s, however, the mechanism behind its forming and maintenance has been a long-standing mystery.”

A new kind of approach has been developed

Horinouchi and his colleagues from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science developed a precise method to try and track clouds and from there deduce wind velocities from the collected images. These are provided by the infrared and ultraviolet cameras on the Akatsuki spacecraft which began to orbit Venus in December 2015.

Horinouchi explained that “The group first noticed that atmospheric temperature differences between low and high latitudes are as small as it cannot be explained without a circulation across latitudes. Since such circulation should alter the wind distribution and weaken the super-rotation peak, it also implies there is another mechanism that reinforces and maintains the observed wind distribution.”

Further analysis also revealed that the maintenance is actually being sustained by the thermal tide, which then provides acceleration when it comes to low altitudes.

Other earlier studies have shown that atmospheric turbulence and waves may also provide acceleration. However, the current research states that they work oppositely to decelerate the rotation at a very low altitude.

“Their findings uncovered the factors that maintain the super-rotation while suggesting a dual circulation system that effectively transports heat across the globe: the meridional circulation that slowly transports heat towards the poles and the super-rotation that rapidly transports heat towards the planet’s nightside,” SciTech Daily has said.

“Our study could help better understand atmospheric systems on tidally-locked exo-planets whose one side always facing the central stars, which is similar to Venus having a very long solar day,” Horinouchi added.

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According To Iran News, NASA satellite images show a dramatic fall in pollution over China that is “partly related” to the economic slowdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, the space agency said.

The reduction in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution was first noticed near Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, but eventually spread across China, according to NASA scientists who examined data collected by their and European Space Agency satellites.

Maps comparing NO2 concentrations showed a marked decline between January 1-20, before a sweeping quarantine was imposed on Wuhan and other cities, and February 10-25.

“There is evidence that the change is at least partly related to the economic slowdown following the outbreak of coronavirus,” NASA’s Earth Observatory said in a statement, AFP reported.

Chinese authorities have taken drastic steps to contain the virus, curbing the movement of people, temporarily closing factories across the country and quarantining central Hubei province, a key industrial region where the epidemic first appeared.

NO2 is a byproduct of fossil fuel combustion in vehicles and power plants and can cause respiratory problems, such as asthma.

“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,” Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said.

The 2008 global financial crisis saw a decrease in NO2 over several countries but it was a gradual fall, she said.

This year’s fall came during the Lunar New Year, when factories and businesses close, but researchers believe the decline is far greater than could be attributed to the holiday period.

NO2 concentrations over eastern and central China were 10-30 percent lower than what is normally observed over the time period.

And there has not been a rebound in levels after the holiday.

“This year, the reduction rate is more significant than in past years and it has lasted longer,” Liu said.

“I am not surprised because many cities nationwide have taken measures to minimize spread of the virus.”

A separate study in February found China’s carbon emissions had dropped by least 100 million metric tons in the previous fortnight — nearly six percent of global emissions during the same period last year.

According to a study by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland, the rapid spread of the coronavirus led to a drop in demand for coal and oil, resulting in the emissions slump.

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But just as things were getting good, the probe stopped transmitting 57 minutes and 75 miles into its descent, crushed by the pressure of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Intriguingly, Galileo detected that the amount of water in the atmosphere increased as it dove down. However, scientists were disappointed when the data reflected ten times less water than anticipated.

Enter NASA’s Juno mission, which launched in 2011 and began conducting scientific flybys of the planet in 2016. Scientists have used data from the first eight flybys to determine the amount of water in Jupiter’s atmosphere at the equator, according to a new study.

“The Juno mission was in part motivated by the need to determine the water abundance at multiple locations across the planet,” the authors wrote in the study, which published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy.

To be clear, water doesn’t necessarily mean liquid water, but its components of hydrogen and oxygen. Understanding the amount of water on Jupiter can provide more information about the gas giant’s past. The largest planet in our solar system was also likely the first to form after the sun. The theory of planet formation suggests that Jupiter received the bulk of the gas and dust leftover from our star.

Scientists want to know how much water was included in this process. And Jupiter reflects processes that include water and moisture, like its weather patterns and even its lightning, as witnessed by the Voyager probe in 1979.

Based on thermodynamic calculations, scientists believe that there are three distinct cloud layers in Jupiter’s thick atmosphere. They include ammonia ice clouds, ammonium hydrosulfide ice clouds and clouds made up of water-based droplets and ice, according to the study.

The 1995 Galileo probe data was dropped into a “hotspot” in the boundary between the equator and the north equatorial belt. Data collected during Juno’s flybys showed that water makes up 0.25% of molecules in Jupiter’s atmosphere at its equator.

Juno is also equipped with the Microwave Radiometer. Rather than descending through Jupiter’s atmosphere, Juno uses this instrument to study it from above through six antennae gathering temperature data at various depths, according to NASA. It relies on microwave technology to detect water absorption at different wavelengths.

Juno was also able to surpass the depth of Galileo’s descent, gathering data farther down in the atmosphere at 93 miles.

“We found the water in the equator to be greater than what the Galileo probe measured,” said Cheng Li, a Juno scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Because the equatorial region is very unique at Jupiter, we need to compare these results with how much water is in other regions.”

The study authors warn that these findings may not be indicative of water abundance across Jupiter.

If it is globally reflective, it may suggest that the planetary building blocks that formed Jupiter were unlikely to have been water-rich clathrate hydrates, or crystalline water-based solids like ice.

“Just when we think we have things figured out, Jupiter reminds us how much we still have to learn,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Juno’s surprise discovery that the atmosphere was not well-mixed even well below the cloud tops is a puzzle that we are still trying to figure out. No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet.”

In the future, the team hopes to learn how the water content may vary across regions and how the poles, dotted with cyclones, could reflect more insight.

“Every science flyby is an event of discovery,” said Bolton. “With Jupiter, there is always something new. Juno has taught us an important lesson: We need to get up close and personal to a planet to test our theories.”

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Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are cooking up an alien atmosphere right here on Earth.

In a new study, JPL scientists used a high-temperature “oven” to heat a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 Celsius), about the temperature of molten lava. The aim was to simulate conditions that might be found in the atmospheres of a special class of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) called “hot Jupiters.”

Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit very close to their parent star, unlike any of the planets in our solar system. While Earth takes 365 days to orbit the Sun, hot Jupiters orbit their stars in less than 10 days. Their close proximity to a star means their temperatures can range from 1,000 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (530 to 2,800 degrees Celsius) or even hotter. By comparison, a hot day on the surface of Mercury (which takes 88 days to orbit the Sun) reaches about 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius).

“Though it is impossible to exactly simulate in the laboratory these harsh exoplanet environments, we can come very close,” said JPL principal scientist Murthy Gudipati, who leads the group that conducted the new study, published last month in the Astrophysical Journal.

The team started with a simple chemical mixture of mostly hydrogen gas and 0.3 percent carbon monoxide gas. These molecules are extremely common in the universe and in early solar systems, and they could reasonably compose the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter. Then the team heated the mixture to between 620 and 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit (330 and 1,230 Celsius).

The team also exposed the laboratory brew to a high dose of ultraviolet radiation – similar to what a hot Jupiter would experience orbiting so close to its parent star. The UV light proved to be a potent ingredient. It was largely responsible for some of the study’s more surprising results about the chemistry that might be taking place in these toasty atmospheres.

Hot Jupiters are large by planet standards, and they radiate more light than cooler planets. Such factors have allowed astronomers to gather more information about their atmospheres than most other types of exoplanets. Those observations reveal that many hot Jupiter atmospheres are opaque at high altitudes. Although clouds might explain the opacity, they become less and less sustainable as the pressure decreases, and the opacity has been observed where the atmospheric pressure is very low.

Scientists have been looking for potential explanations other than clouds, and aerosols – solid particles suspended in the atmosphere – could be one. However, according to the JPL researchers, scientists were previously unaware of how aerosols might develop in hot Jupiter atmospheres. In the new experiment, adding UV light to the hot chemical mix did the trick.

“This result changes the way we interpret those hazy hot Jupiter atmospheres,” said Benjamin Fleury, a JPL research scientist and lead author of the study. “Going forward, we want to study the properties of these aerosols. We want to better understand how they form, how they absorb light and how they respond to changes in the environment. All that information can help astronomers understand what they’re seeing when they observe these planets.”

The study yielded another surprise: The chemical reactions produced significant amounts of carbon dioxide and water. While water vapor has been found in hot Jupiter atmospheres, scientists for the most part expect this precious molecule to form only when there is more oxygen than carbon. The new study shows that water can form when carbon and oxygen are present in equal amounts. (Carbon monoxide contains one carbon atom and one oxygen atom.) And while some carbon dioxide (one carbon and two oxygen atoms) formed without the addition of UV radiation, the reactions accelerated with the addition of simulated starlight.

“These new results are immediately useful for interpreting what we see in hot Jupiter atmospheres,” said JPL exoplanet scientist Mark Swain, a study coauthor. “We’ve assumed that temperature dominates the chemistry in these atmospheres, but this shows we need to look at how radiation plays a role.”

With next-generation tools like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2021, scientists might produce the first detailed chemical profiles of exoplanet atmospheres, and it’s possible that some of those first subjects will be hot Jupiters. These studies will help scientists learn how other solar systems form and how similar or different they are to our own.

For the JPL researchers, the work has just begun. Unlike a typical oven, theirs seals the gas in tightly to prevent leaks or contamination, and it allows the researchers to control the pressure of the gas as the temperature rises. With this hardware, they can now simulate exoplanet atmospheres at even higher temperatures: close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius).

“It’s been an ongoing challenge figuring out how to design and operate this system successfully, since most standard components such as glass or aluminum melt at these temperatures,” said JPL research scientist Bryana Henderson, a coauthor of the study. “We’re still learning how to push these boundaries while safely handling these chemical processes in the lab. But at the end of the day, the exciting results that come out of these experiments is worth all the extra effort.”

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Early data from the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission revealed water locked inside Bennu.

Information gathered by the spacecraft’s OVIRS and OTES spectrometers reveals the presence of molecules that contain oxygen and hydrogen atoms bonded together, known as “hydroxyls.”

Scientists believe these hydroxyl groups exist across the asteroid in water-bearing clay minerals, suggesting that, at some point, Bennu’s rocky surface interacted with water, Geek reported.

The orb itself is too small to have hosted liquid water, according to NASA. But fluids were present at some point on Bennu’s parent body—a much larger asteroid.

“The presence of hydrated minerals across the asteroid confirms that Bennu, a remnant from early in the formation of the Solar System, is an excellent specimen for the OSIRIS-REx mission to study the composition of primitive volatiles and organics,” Amy Simon, OVIRS deputy instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

“When samples of this material are returned by the mission to Earth in 2023,” she continued, “scientists will receive a treasure trove of new information about the history and evolution of our Solar System.”

More than two years after its launch in September 2016, OSIRIS-REx finally reached the near-Earth asteroid last week. The spacecraft is now in survey mode, flying over Bennu’s north pole, equator, and south pole at close ranges to determine the planetoid’s mass.

“Our initial data show that the team picked the right asteroid as the target of the OSIRIS-REx mission,” Dante Lauretta, principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said. “We have not discovered any insurmountable issues at Bennu so far.

“The spacecraft is healthy and the science instruments are working better than required,” he added. “It is time now for our adventure to begin.”

The third New Frontiers planetary science mission (following Juno and New Horizons), OSIRIS-REx is expected to return to Earth with a collected specimen in September 2023.

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It’s not an easy gig to get — some 18,000 people routinely seek the 12 spots that open each year.

Kulin, who joined his class sounding upbeat, is the first would-be astronaut to leave training since a resignation in 1968.

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The spacecraft is designed to circle Bennu, and reach out with a robotic arm to “high-five” its surface, then return the sample it collects to Earth in 2023.

The first images of Bennu were taken on August 17 at a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from the $800 million spacecraft.

“This is the closest we have even been to Bennu,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

“This is significant in that we are now in the vicinity of the asteroid, closer than we have ever been even during the close approaches of the asteroid to the Earth.”

Bennu was chosen from the some 500,000 asteroids in the solar system because it orbits close to Earth’s path around the sun, it is the right size for scientific study, and is one of the oldest asteroids known to NASA.

Astronomers say it poses a slight risk — a one in 2,700 chance — of colliding with Earth in 2135.

It is also a carbon-rich asteroid, the kind of cosmic body that may have delivered life-giving materials to Earth billions of years ago.

The OSIRIS-REx mission is not the first to ever visit an asteroid and attempt a sample return — Japan has done it before and Europe has managed to land on a comet.

But it is the first asteroid-sample-return mission for NASA, and it aims to bring back the biggest sample ever, on the order of 2.1 ounces (60 grams).

The US men who walked on the Moon during the Apollo era of the 1960s and 1970s collected and carried back to Earth 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of moon rocks.

In December, the spacecraft will begin a detailed survey of asteroid’s surface, which NASA has defined as “arrival” at the asteroid.

Orbital insertion is expected on December 31.

The sample, however, will not be taken until July 2020.

OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.

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