TRANSCRIPT
A NASA space capsule carrying the largest soil sample ever scooped up from the surface of an asteroid streaked through Earth's atmosphere and parachuted into the Utah desert, delivering the celestial specimen to scientists.
The capsule, released from the robotic spacecraft Osiris-Rex as the mothership passed within 108,000 km of Earth hours earlier, touched down within a designated landing zone west of Salt Lake City on the U-S military's vast Utah Test and Training Range.
Co-investigator of the Osiris-Rex mission Danny Glavin told NASA there could be many surprises to be found amongst the samples in the capsule.
“So I mean we're definitely looking for the building blocks of life and we've been studying meteorites that we think look like Bennu. And so I'd fully expect to find amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, sugars, an energy source for life, nucleobases, right? Parts of the genetic code. So, we'll see what Bennu tells us, one thing I've learned from this mission is (there's) so many surprises, sample analysis probably won't be an exception, we're going to be surprised."
The final descent and landing, shown on a NASA livestream, capped a six-year joint mission between the U-S space agency and the University of Arizona.
It marked only the third asteroid sample, and by far the biggest, ever returned to Earth for analysis, following two similar missions by Japan's space agency ending in 2010 and 2020.
Osiris-Rex collected its specimen three years ago from Bennu, a small, carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999.
The space rock is classified as a "near-Earth object" because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years, though the odds of an impact are considered remote.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has congratulated the Osiris-Rex team for their success, adding that it'll give scientists the chance to improve their knowledge of the formation of the universe.
"It's going to help scientists investigate planet formation it's going to improve our understanding of asteroids that could possibly impact the Earth and it'll deepen our understanding of the origin of our solar system and its formation."
The pristine samples are believed to be the leftover building blocks from the dawn of our solar system.
Osiris-Rex rocketed away on the mission in 2016.
It reached Bennu two years later and, using a long stick vacuum, grabbed dust and pebbles from the small roundish space rock in 2020.
By the time it returned, the spacecraft had travelled 6.2 billion kilometres.
The Director of NASA's Goddard Science Centre, MaKenzie Lystrup, explains the importance of systems engineering for the success of this mission.
"Systems engineering is critical. And it's one of the things that Goddard really brings to the table. Systems engineering means that we take into account everything about the mission, from the science ideas, to the launch, to orchestrating the landing here on earth, but making sure that all of the instruments are working together, making sure that the spacecraft successfully interfaces with the instruments and can carry out its job once it was at Bennu, all of that requires really understanding the entire system. So when we say systems engineering, we're really talking about that overarching, holistic perspective that our scientists and our engineers bring to the table."
Twenty minutes after releasing the sample capsule, Osiris-Rex, now renamed Osiris-Apex, began its next mission targeting another asteroid.
That encounter won't occur until 2029.
Lori Glaze, Director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, explains.
"Now that the spacecraft has released the capsule successfully, about 20 minutes after that release we are now repurposing the spacecraft for a new mission called Osiris-Apex, where APEX stands for 'Apophis Explorer' and it's off on its new mission to explore the asteroid Apophis, which is going to have a close fly-by of earth in 2029."
Speaking during NASA's livestream program, Ms Glaze has also provided further insight on some of the space agency's upcoming missions.
"In two days, on September 26, is the one-year anniversary of a little mission you may have heard of last year called the double asteroid redirection test, demonstrating for the first-time humanity's ability to deflect the path of an asteroid. How cool is that? And then coming up on October 5th is the launch of a mission called Psyche, going to visit a special asteroid called Psyche, also, which is one of only about nine of asteroids that we think are made primarily of metal, have a very high metal content, iron and nickel. And then, about a month after that, on November 1st, is going to be the first asteroid fly-by of our mission called Lucy, which will ultimately visit Trojan asteroids that lead and trail Jupiter in its orbit around the sun, but in November will fly by a mainbelt asteroid called Dinkinesh."
NASA’s recovery effort of the Osiris-Rex capsule in Utah included helicopters and a temporary clean room set up at the range.
The samples from asteroid Bennu are expected to be flown to a new lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
