UA proposal a finalist for NASA grant

by Anne Ryman - Dec. 30, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

The University of Arizona's proposal to send a spacecraft to an asteroid and return with a sample is one of three finalists for a $650 million NASA grant.

If successful, it would mark the largest single space grant the university has received. UA's last big space mission was the 2008 Phoenix Mars Mission at $428 million.

UA professor Michael Drake's proposal is competing against a proposal to probe the surface of Venus by the University of Colorado-Boulder and a proposal to send a robot to the moon's south pole and return rocks for study by Washington University-St. Louis.

Drake is director of the school's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, which is known internationally for its research.

NASA won't make a selection on the grant until mid-2011 with the mission scheduled to launch no later than Dec. 30, 2018.

Drake and the two other finalists will each get $3.3 million over the next year to refine their mission proposals.

His proposal is called the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer spacecraft, or Osiris-Rex for short. The spacecraft would collect and return a small sample of material from the asteroid's surface with the goal of finding out more about how the solar system formed.

Reach the reporter at anne.ryman@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8072.