The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived in Utah Sunday, carrying material from the asteroid Bennu — and the dawn of the solar system.
A capsule bearing soil from an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth landed in Utah at 8:52 am Mountain time Sunday, bringing with it — scientists hope — information about the origin of life.
The NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, delivered a sample of material from the asteroid Bennu. The space rock is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old — meaning it formed around the same time as the solar system and likely holds pre-solar material, as well as amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Seven years after its initial launch, OSIRIS-REx deposited the capsule of uncontaminated material from Bennu to the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles from Salt Lake City, before heading off on another mission, this time to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis.What Bennu can tell us about some of life’s biggest questions
After the sample landed, the OSIRIS-REx team connected the sample to a 100-foot cable dangling from a helicopter for transport to a temporary clean room, free from contaminants in the Earth’s atmosphere, where it will be preserved with nitrogen and then transported to Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Parts of the sample will then be shipped to other research labs, and some will also be preserved for future generations of scientists to study — similar to how today’s researchers still study samples of material from the moon brought back decades ago on Apollo 11, humanity’s first moon landing.
