Eastside company helps NASA in collection of piece of 4 billion-year-old asteroid

A group of engineers from Redmond helped to make history Tuesday as NASA collected a piece of an asteroid that is over four billion years old.

The sample will come back to Earth to be studied.

But the 200-million-mile journey to reach the asteroid would not have been successful without the help of 28 engines built in western Washington.

“There’s a lot of things that have to go right for this mission to be successful, including the use of engines,” said Fred Wilson with Aerojet Rocketdyne. “At our AR facility here in Redmond, Washington, we probably had 50 to 100 people involved over the course of the design, build, testing and delivery.”

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission will help scientists and engineers learn more about the solar system, but to do that it must land on the asteroid, gather a sample and relaunch.

“Our engines will be used to maneuver the spacecraft down to the surface for the sample collection,” Wilson said.

Four different kinds of Aerojet Rocketdyne engines will do the job. Wilson helped make it possible; he’s part of NASA’s first-ever mission to chip off a piece of an asteroid.

The journey started four years ago, and the cost to make the trip was $800 million. However, the cost was worth it for the company, which spent nearly a decade developing the engines to get to the asteroid Bennu.

“There’s a lot of different things that could come out of this. Asteroid mining is one of the applications,” Wilson said.

NASA said its spacecraft is about as big as a KIRO 7 live truck, and sending something the size of a van to an asteroid is a little more complicated.

“This particular van has over 2700 lbs. of rocket fuel on board,” Wilson said. “The most intriguing part to me of the mission is the excitement of bringing a sample back to Earth.”

The company said its engines will tell NASA how big the sample is, since the craft will be carrying extra weight.

“They got plenty of time to get the sample before they have to accelerate with our engines back to earth,” said Wilson.

The window for Aerojet Rocketdyne’s engines to fire up for the return trip home opens in March 2021, bringing back the largest sample collected from an asteroid. It is expected to land in Utah in 2023, making it a bold mission with a big payoff for science.

“We feel really confident about this being a big success today, but you never know,” Wilson said.

Cox Media Group