Chunks of asteroid that could tell us about the earliest days of the 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and the possible origins of water on our planet are set to land in the Utah desert Sunday.
It's a moment more than a decade in the making for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx. Its goal was to scoop up a large sample of rocks and dust from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and bring it to our planet to study. Thesuccessfully snagged its prize in 2020 and this weekend will finally pass by Earth and release a capsule containing the sample and send it careening down to Utah.
"Asteroids, we believe, could have been the source material not just for building up the rocky parts of our planet, but also for delivering the water that makes up our hydrologic system," Glaze said. The spacecraft left Bennu with the sample in 2021, and has been en route to Earth ever since. On Sunday morning, OSIRIS-REx will come within 63,000 miles of Earth, which is when the last leg of the journey begins—and not one entirely without risks.
The container will come into the atmosphere at about 27,000 miles per hour and heat up to around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It has a From there, a helicopter will tow it via cable to a clean room, where a nitrogen purge will rid it of possible contaminants. Then it will head to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the sample will be revealed to the public in October.
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