In a triumphant conclusion to a six-year joint mission between NASA and the University of Arizona, a NASA space capsule carrying a ground-breaking asteroid soil sample successfully parachuted into the Utah desert on Sunday . The capsule, originally from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, carried the largest soil specimen ever recovered from the surface of an asteroid.
The capsule made its final descent to the designated landing zone at the US Army Training and Test Range, west of Salt Lake City, after being released from OSIRIS-REx, which was 67,000 miles from Earth hours earlier. This marked the third, and significantly largest, sample of asteroids returned to Earth for study.
The specimen was collected three years before Bennu, a carbon-rich near-Earth object discovered in 1999. Bennu, a relic essentially unchanged from its formation 4.5 billion years ago, serves as scientific goldmine, which could hold clues to the development of rocky planets and possibly contain organic molecules crucial to the emergence of life.
OSIRIS-REx, launched in September 2016, approached Bennu in 2018 and managed to collect the sample on October 20, 2020. After the collection, the spacecraft began its journey back to the 1.2 billion mile Earth in May 2021, with the capsule. survive a fiery entry, deploying parachutes and landing softly on the desert floor of northwestern Utah.
The sample, estimated at 250 grams, dwarfs previous samples and will be sent to 200 scientists from 60 global laboratories after initial examination at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The remaining part of OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to continue its exploration, targeting another near-Earth asteroid, Apophis.
This article is sourced from and written by AI.
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