NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission with first-ever samples of an asteroid in deep space have landed safely on Earth in the Utah Desert to the space agency’s facility in Houston on September 24.
Key facts
- The U.S. Air Force successfully recovered the space capsule with samples of asteroid Bennu taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2020.
- It landed Getting the sample under a “nitrogen purge,” as scientists call it, was one of the OSIRIS-REx team’s most critical tasks. Nitrogen is a gas that doesn’t interact with most other chemicals, and a continuous flow of it into the sample container inside the capsule will keep out earthly contaminants to leave the sample pure for scientific analyses.
- The OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) marks the first time that NASA has taken a sample of an asteroid.
- Samples carried by the OSIRIS-REx mission are important because asteroids like Bennu can act as “time capsules” of the earliest history of our solar system. They can preserve chemical signatures from a long time ago when the universe was a younger place. In fact, it is even possible that they contain samples of the ancient building blocks of life.
- Currently Bennu is orbiting the sun 81 million km (50 million miles) from Earth.
- It’s believed to be the broken fragment of a much larger asteroid.
- This was NASA’s third sample return from a deep-space robotic mission.
- The Genesis spacecraft dropped off bits of solar wind in 2004, but the samples were compromised when the parachute failed and the capsule slammed into the ground.
- The Stardust spacecraft successfully delivered comet dust in 2006.
- Japan is the only other country to bring back asteroid samples (Hayabusa2 mission-Ryugu asteroid). gathered about a teaspoon in a pair of asteroid missions.
