Samples from the asteroid were collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe, which flew by Earth early Sunday morning and “dropped” the casing over a designated landing zone in the Utah desert.
The unofficial landing time was 8:52 a.m. local time (4:52 p.m. CEST), three minutes earlier than expected, she said American television.
This is the first time ever that the United States managed to collect material on a foreign planet and then transport it back to Earth for research.
The NASA probe lost part of the samples from the asteroid, but it still has enough
The NASA science team was congratulated on its success by Bruce Betts, senior scientist at The Planetary Society, a non-profit organization that deals with space from a scientific and political perspective. Betts called the mission “impressive and very complex” and added that the samples from the asteroid are the start of an exciting new chapter in the history of space.
“It’s exciting because this mission started in 2016. So there’s a feeling of, ‘Wow, this day has finally arrived,'” he said. “But scientifically it’s exciting because it’s an amazing opportunity to study a very complex story that goes back to the dawn of the Solar System,” he added.
About the length of the Empire State Building, Bennu is more than 200 million kilometers from Earth. But there are times when it orbits so that its distance is reduced to 4.6 million kilometers from our home.
Photo: Profimedia.cz
NASA employees during a sample retrieval test
2023-09-24 15:01:25
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