Once again, Earth experienced asteroid fragments speeding through its atmosphere to an empty patch of North American desert. But instead of crashing in a destructive fireball, these bits of space rock rode a controlled descent safe inside a man-made capsule.
NASA welcomed its first asteroid sample delivery on Sept. 24 with the return of its OSIRIS-REx—the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer.
Its arrival on the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range marks the end of a mission nearly two decades in the making.
“Today capped the end of an almost 20-year adventure for me,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, told reporters at a post-landing press conference.
“I got involved in this program [in] February of 2004. When representatives from Lockheed Martin came to Tucson, they said they were thinking up an asteroid sample return mission, and they wanted U of A to take a scientific leadership role.”
Mr. Lauretta was brought in as the deputy principal investigator but inherited the higher role from his mentor, professor Mike Drake. Mr. Drake died in 2011, just four months after he and Mr. Lauretta won the contract from NASA.
“I know he would have been super proud and would have loved today,” he said.
Mr. Lauretta was joined at the press conference by Mike Moreau, OSIRIS-REx recovery lead; Tim Priser, chief engineer for deep space exploration at Lockheed Martin; and Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Division for Planetary Sciences.
“It’s hard to describe what it means to be in this moment,” Mr. Moreau said. “I’ve worked on this project not as long as many of us, but a decade through the early development of the mission, to the mission operations, to leading the recovery team.”
Mr. Priser noted that team members watching from the mission support area in Littleton, Colorado, celebrated when the main parachute deployed.
“That’s when it becomes real,” he said. “Because think of the thousands of hours that all of these people spent over a decade or more, right? Years together. They just naturally build relationships that last a lifetime. They watch each other’s children grow up over that time frame. And so their children were excited. Family and friends were back there, and it’s just a special, special occasion.”
Mission leaders called the landing a terrific success, with nearly everything going according to plan.
Mr. Moreau shared his experience being in the control room, boasting the precision of the spacecraft operators and the advantage they had in being able to utilize the U.S. Air Force’s tracking cameras and radar systems.
Mr. Lauretta touted that the mission was brought home on schedule, under budget, and with more sample material than he and his team ever thought possible.
The mission was subject to planetary protection reviews but was given an “unrestricted Earth return” because the asteroid sampled, named Bennu, was a near-Earth asteroid, and it was believed that material had already interacted with Earth in the past. It was also a very small body that was constantly exposed to ionizing radiation.
“We’re more worried about Earth’s biology contaminating the sample,” Mr. Lauretta said.
The samples remain in their container under a nitrogen purge to keep them separated from Earth-based contaminants.
They are set to be moved to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they will be examined as early as Sept. 26 by a science team consisting of more than 200 people across the globe.
“[These samples] are going to be a treasure for scientific analysis for years and years and years to come,” Ms. Glaze said. “To our kids and our grandkids and people that haven’t even been born yet. It’s going to be absolutely incredible.”
But while the Bennu samples begin a new Earth-bound journey, the mother ship, OSIRIS-REx, remains in operation. After making its drop-off, the spacecraft is now bound for its next target: the asteroid Apophis. It’s expected to make the rendezvous in April 2029.
