NASA asteroid sample successfully lands in the desert of Utah

SALT LAKE CITY: On Sunday, a NASA spacecraft carrying the largest asteroid soil sample ever collected sped through Earth’s atmosphere and fell on the Utah desert, bringing the cosmic specimen to scientists.

The robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx dropped a gumdrop-shaped capsule hours earlier as the mothership passed within 67,000 miles (107,826 km) of Earth. The capsule landed on the huge Utah Test and Training Range of the US military in a designated landing zone west of Salt Lake City.

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The final descent and landing, shown on a NASA livestream, capped a six-year joint mission between the US space agency and the University of Arizona. It was only the third asteroid sample, and by far the biggest, ever returned to Earth for analysis, following two similar missions by Japan’s space agency ending in 2010 and 2020.

A red-and-white parachute that slowed the capsule’s rapid descent rested nearby after disconnecting as it landed nose-down on the sandy floor of the Utah desert.

The main chute unfolded as intended after some uncertainty regarding the successful deployment of the preliminary chute, resulting in a soft and almost faultless landing for the capsule.

Dante Lauretta, a scientist from the University of Arizona who has worked on the project since its inception and witnessed the descent from a helicopter, said at a press conference, “We heard ‘main chute found,’ and I literally broke into tears. As a Lockheed Martin engineer working on the project, Tim Prizer, put it, “we touched down as soft as a dove.”

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OSIRIS-REx collected its specimen three years ago from Bennu, a small, carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999. The space rock is classified as a “near-Earth object” because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years. Though the odds of an impact are considered remote.

Apparently made up of a loose collection of rocks, like a rubble pile, Bennu measures just 500 meters (547 yards) across, making it wider than the Empire State Building is tall but tiny compared with the Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.

Bennu is an artifact of the early solar system, like other asteroids. It provides important hints about the formation and evolution of rocky planets like Earth since its current chemistry and mineralogy have hardly changed since it formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

Two organic compounds discovered in samples from Ryugu, another near-Earth asteroid, that brought back three years ago by the Japanese mission Hayabusa2. This finding supports the idea that celestial bodies like comets, asteroids, and meteorites that bombarded early Earth seeded the young planet with the primordial ingredients for life.

OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and reached Bennu in 2018, then spent nearly two years orbiting the asteroid before venturing close enough to snatch a sample of the loose surface material with its robotic arm on October 20, 2020. The spacecraft departed Bennu in May 2021 for a 1.2 billion-mile (1.9 billion km) cruise back to Earth, including two orbits around the sun.

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Hitting the upper atmosphere at 35 times the speed of sound about 13 minutes before landing, the capsule glowed red hot as it plunged earthward and temperatures on its heat shield reached 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,800 C).

The Bennu sample has estimated at 250 grams (8.8 ounces), far surpassing the 5 grams carried back from Ryugu in 2020 or the tiny specimen delivered from asteroid Itokawa in 2010.

A recovery team of scientists and technicians stood by to retrieve the capsule and attempt to keep the sample free of any terrestrial contamination.

The mysterious capsule and its priceless contents were helicoptered to the Utah test range’s “clean room” for preliminary inspection. A military transport aircraft will transfer it to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Where the canister will opened and the samples will divided into smaller specimens that will be distributed to about 200 scientists working in 60 facilities across the world.

Meanwhile, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s main body is anticipated to continue on its journey to investigate Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid.