Nasa asteroid sample parachutes safely into Utah desert

A Nasa space capsule carrying the largest soil sample ever scooped up from the surface of an asteroid streaked through Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday and parachuted into the Utah desert, delivering the celestial specimen to scientists.

The gumdrop-shaped capsule, released from the robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REX as the mother ship passed within 107,826km of Earth hours earlier, touched down within a designated landing zone west of Salt Lake City on the military’s vast Utah Test and Training Range.

The final descent and landing, shown on a Nasa live stream, capped a six-year joint mission between the US space agency and the University of Arizona. It was only the third asteroid sample, and by far the biggest, ever returned to Earth for analysis, after two similar missions by Japan’s space agency ending in 2010 and 2020.

After touchdown, the capsule lay nose-down on the sandy floor of the Utah desert, a red-and-white parachute that slowed its high-speed descent resting just feet away after detaching. After some doubt about whether a preliminary chute was properly deployed, the main chute unfurled as planned, bringing the capsule to a soft and nearly flawless landing.

“We heard ‘main chute detected’, and I literally broke into tears,” Dante Lauretta, a University of Arizona scientist who has been involved in the project since its origin and watched the descent from a helicopter, told a press conference. Tim Prizer, a Lockheed Martin engineer on the project, said, “we touched down as soft as a dove”.

The dark capsule and its precious content were flown by helicopter to a “clean room” at the Utah test range for initial examination. Later on Monday it would be flown on a military transport plane to Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The canister will be opened on Tuesday for the samples to be parcelled into smaller specimens promised to about 200 scientists in 60 laboratories around the world.

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.

Apparently made up of a loose collection of rocks, like a rubble pile, Bennu measures just 500m across, making it wider than the Empire State Building is tall but tiny compared with the Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth about 66-million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.

Like other asteroids, Bennu is a relic of the early solar system. Because its present-day chemistry and mineralogy are virtually unchanged since forming about 4.5-billion years ago, it holds valuable clues to the origins and development of rocky planets such as Earth. It may even contain organic molecules similar to those necessary for the emergence of microbes.

OSIRIS-REX was launched in September 2016 and reached Bennu in 2018, then spent nearly two years orbiting the asteroid before venturing close enough to snatch a sample of the loose surface material with its robotic arm on October 20 2020.

The spacecraft departed Bennu in May 2021 for a 1.9-billion kilometre cruise back to Earth, including two orbits around the sun. Hitting the upper atmosphere at 35 times the speed of sound about 13 minutes before landing, the capsule glowed red hot as it plunged earthwards and temperatures on its heat shield reached 2,800°C.

The Bennu sample has been estimated at 250g, far surpassing the
5g carried back from Ryugu in 2020 or the tiny specimen delivered from asteroid Itokawa in 2010.

The main portion of the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft, meanwhile, is to sail on to explore Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid.

Reuters