The country’s first pristine asteroid sample — protected by a heat shield invented in Silicon Valley — landed in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert Sunday morning, where it was greeted by a team of NASA scientists hoping to study its chemical composition.
The sample was taken from the asteroid Bennu, where in 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched down on the asteroid’s surface to collect rock and dust. It took two years to get there and two years to measure the asteroid — and now, it has returned to Earth with a sample in tow.
“Bennu is a leftover fragment from the tumultuous formation of the solar system,” said NASA on X, formerly Twitter, around 8 a.m. “The samples will help scientists better understand the origins of our solar system, and might contain clues to the role asteroids may have played in delivering life-forming compounds to Earth.”
After being preserved in space for millennia, NASA said Bennu “is a time capsule from the early solar system,” and could perhaps contain clues to the origin of life. Portions of Bennu’s rocks and dust are now being distributed to scientists both on the NASA team and around the world, the agency said Sunday morning.
Live Now: #OSIRISREx delivers the US's first pristine asteroid sample after a 3.86 billion-mile journey. Watch landing live from @DeptOfDefense's Utah Test & Training Range. Use #AskNASA to send us your questions. https://t.co/biS33u6RtP
— NASA (@NASA) September 24, 2023
Unlike the typical arrival of meteorites — portions of asteroids that fall to the earth over time — this portion of Bennu will be in perfect condition, untouched by the fiery, violent descent through Earth’s atmosphere that naked meteorites experience. That’s due to the design of the sample-seizing operation, and the thermal protected capsule made of lighter-than-water metallic material.
The #OSIRISREx spacecraft has released the capsule containing a piece of asteroid Bennu. The capsule will plummet through space for four hours, enter the atmosphere over California and land about 13 minutes later in Utah. https://t.co/lK5QmILjtj pic.twitter.com/gECoNC1sHU
— NASA Solar System (@NASASolarSystem) September 24, 2023
Bennu, NASA said, is the size of a small, constantly spinning mountain, one with a 500-meter diameter. The spacecraft has about the mass of an SUV — and after it touched the surface of Bennu at about .25 miles per hour, NASA reassured the public that the asteroid’s trajectory did not change.
About 20 minutes after the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft released the sample toward earth, it sped off toward its new mission: this time focused on Apophis, an asteroid double the size of Bennu expected to come within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029. That’s just one-tenth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, NASA said — and the now-renamed OSIRIS-APEX will be ready when that happens.
The spacecraft will enter orbit soon after the asteroid approaches Earth, poised to study how the asteroid’s orbit, spin rate, and surface changes as it gets closer to our home.
Science reporter Lisa Kreiger contributed to this story.
