Hyperdrive
Largest Asteroid Sample Ever Collected Is Coming Down to Earth
- Decade-long mission to recover rocks set to end Sunday
- Particles could help scientists understand early space days
View of the North from Bennu’s Southern Hemisphere.
Source: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
This article is for subscribers only.
Chunks of asteroid that could tell us about the earliest days of the 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and the possible origins of water on our planet are set to land in the Utah desert Sunday.
It’s a moment more than a decade in the making for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx. Its goal was to scoop up a large sample of rocks and dust from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and bring it to our planet to study. The spacecraft successfully snagged its prize in 2020 and this weekend will finally pass by Earth and release a capsule containing the sample and send it careening down to Utah.