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If all goes as planned, on Sunday morning a bell-shaped space capsule the size of a mini-fridge will come screaming down through the atmosphere toward a Utah desert. Inside will be some precious cargo: about a cup's worth of rock and dust that a NASA spacecraft collected from an asteroid called Bennu that was, at the time, more than 200 million miles away. This will be the biggest amount of extraterrestrial material to be brought back to Earth by any nation since the Apollo astronauts hauled home moon rocks, and it's the culmination of NASA's first mission to bring home samples of an asteroid.
The Osiris-Rex probe's final, fiery descent through Earth's atmosphere will be perilous, but the US space agency is hoping for a soft landing, around 9:00am local (15H00 GMT), in a military test range in northwestern Utah.
Osiris-Rex is set to release the capsule—from an altitude of more than 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers)—some four hours before it lands.
“The asteroids date from about 500 million years earlier in time than the oldest rocks on Earth. So as a geologist, I want to go back all the way to the beginning,” Lauretta said. “And the fun thing is, when you’re looking at asteroids you go literally to the very beginning of the solar system.”
“We opened up the canister today, and we did see that there is some black dust-like material that's visible," Lauretta said Tuesday. "We're hoping that's from Bennu. We expect that we'll be collecting a portion of that tomorrow morning, and that'll go right into laboratories."
"This is our first glimpse of what we might have," said Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx mission's principal investigator. "There's good indication that we might have sample."
No alien popped out and said 'take me to your leader'? BOOOORRRRING. It will be interesting to see what organics are in it though. They must have to take severe precautions to prevent contamination. Or they might find that the asteroid has covid.
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