NASA space capsule, carrying the most extensive soil sample ever collected from the surface of an asteroid, streaked through Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday and gracefully parachuted into the Utah desert. This momentous event marked the successful delivery of a celestial specimen to eager scientists.
The capsule, resembling a gumdrop, had been released from the robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx earlier, as the mothership passed within 67,000 miles (107,826 km) of Earth. It touched down precisely within a designated landing zone west of Salt Lake City, situated on the expansive Utah Test and Training Range, a facility belonging to the U.S. military.
The captivating final descent and landing were broadcast on a NASA livestream, culminating a six-year joint mission between NASA and the University of Arizona. This milestone was only the third instance of an asteroid sample being returned to Earth for analysis, and it was by far the most substantial, following two similar missions by Japan’s space agency in 2010 and 2020.
Upon landing, the capsule settled nose-down on the sandy Utah desert floor, with its red-and-white parachute, which had expertly slowed its high-speed descent, resting just a few feet away after detaching.
The celestial specimen was collected by OSIRIS-REx from Bennu, a relatively small, carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999. Bennu is categorized as a “near-Earth object” due to its periodic close approach to our planet every six years, although the likelihood of an impact is considered remote.
Measuring just 500 meters (547 yards) across, Bennu is roughly wider than the Empire State Building is tall. However, it pales in comparison to the Chicxulub asteroid, which struck Earth some 66 million years ago, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
In the words of NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, “It wasn’t mission impossible; it was the impossible becoming possible.” The mission holds immense scientific value, as Bennu, like other asteroids, preserves crucial information about the early solar system’s chemistry, mineralogy, and possibly even organic molecules that are vital for the emergence of life.
The success of this mission follows Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, which returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020. Those samples contained two organic compounds, bolstering the hypothesis that celestial objects like comets, asteroids, and meteorites may have seeded Earth with the fundamental ingredients for life.
The OSIRIS-REx mission began in September 2016 and reached Bennu in 2018. After nearly two years of orbiting the asteroid, it approached close enough to use its robot arm to collect a sample of surface material on October 20, 2020.
Departing Bennu in May 2021, the spacecraft embarked on a 1.2 billion-mile (1.9 billion km) journey back to Earth, involving two orbits around the sun. The capsule re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at a staggering 35 times the speed of sound, glowing red-hot with heat shield temperatures reaching 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 C). Parachutes deployed during the descent, reducing the capsule’s speed to about 11 mph before its flawless landing in the Utah desert.
While the Bennu sample is estimated to weigh 250 grams (8.8 ounces), significantly surpassing the 5 grams brought back from Ryugu in 2020 and a tiny specimen from asteroid Itokawa in 2010, precise quantification of the material will take at least a week.
A dedicated team of scientists and technicians was on standby to retrieve the capsule and confirm the integrity of both the vessel and the inner canister containing the asteroid material. Their goal is to preserve the sample, ensuring it remains free from terrestrial contamination.
Following an initial assessment at the landing site, the dark capsule, along with its invaluable contents, was transported by helicopter to a “clean room” at the Utah test range for an initial examination. In the coming days, it will be further transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it will be divided into smaller specimens destined for approximately 200 scientists in 60 laboratories across the globe.
As the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft concludes its current mission, it is poised to explore yet another near-Earth asteroid named Apophis.
