A capsule belonging to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) penetrated the Earth’s atmosphere and landed in the desert of the US state of Utah on Sunday, carrying on board the largest soil sample ever collected from an asteroid for scientists to benefit from.
The capsule separated from the OSIRIS-REx robotic vehicle, while the latter was passing at an altitude of 67,000 miles from Earth, to place its travels within a specific landing area west of Salt Lake City in the US Army’s testing and training area in Utah.
This landing, which NASA broadcast live, culminated a six-year joint mission between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the University of Arizona.
This sample is the third to be transferred from an asteroid to Earth for analysis, after two similar missions by the Japanese Space Agency that ended in 2010 and 2020, but this sample is the largest ever.
OSIRIS-REx collected its sample three years ago from the asteroid Bennu, a small asteroid rich in carbon compounds that was discovered in 1999 and is classified as a “near-Earth object” because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years, but the chances of a collision are remote.
Bennu appears to be formed from a disassembled group of rocks and is only 500 meters wide, but it is small compared to the Chicxulub asteroid that struck the Earth about 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
The Bennu sample is estimated at about 250 grams, which far exceeds the sample transported from the Ryugu asteroid in 2020, which amounted to five grams, and the small sample that came from the Itokawa asteroid in 2010.
Once the capsule is secured, the sample will be flown to a “clean room” at the Test and Training Area in Utah for initial examination before being transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to be divided into smaller samples for the benefit of about 200 scientists in 60 laboratories around the world.
