MIAMI: The US space agency on Thursday launched its first mission to collect dust from an asteroid, the kind of cosmic body that may have delivered life-giving materials to Earth billions of years ago.

The unmanned spacecraft, known as OSIRIS-REx, blasted off at 7:05pm atop an Atlas V rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“As the spacecraft soared high above the western tip of Australia, OSIRIS-REx has reached Earth-escape velocity of more than 35,400 kilometres per hour,” Nasa spokesman Mike Curie said an hour after takeoff.

It “is flying free on its way to a seven year mission to rendezvous with the asteroid Bennu and return a sample to Earth.” The $800 million mission will travel to Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid about the size of a small mountain.

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.

“For primitive, carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu, materials are preserved from over four and a half billion years ago,” explained Christina Richey, OSIRIS-REx deputy program scientist at Nasa.

These “may be the precursors to life in Earth or elsewhere in our solar system.” OSIRIS-REx’s main goal is to gather dirt and debris from the surface of the asteroid and return it to Earth by 2023 for further study.

Published in Dawn, September 10th, 2016