NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space on Sunday parachuted into the Utah desert to cap a seven-year journey.
In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 100,000km out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the ship set off after another asteroid.
“We have touchdown,” mission recovery operations announced, immediately repeating the news since the landing occurred three minutes early. Officials later said the orange striped parachute opened four times higher than anticipated — at about 6,100m — basing it on the deceleration rate.
Photo: AFP / NASA / Keegan Barber
To everyone’s relief, the capsule was intact and not breached, keeping its 4.5 billion-year-old samples free of contamination. Within two hours of touchdown, the capsule was inside a temporary clean room at the US Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range, hoisted there by helicopter.
The sealed sample canister was yesterday flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where it was to be opened in a new, specially designed laboratory. The building already houses the hundreds of kilograms of moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts.
“We can’t wait to crack into it. For me, the real science is just beginning,” mission lead scientist Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona said. He was to accompany the samples all the way to Texas.
“Those are going to be a treasure for scientific analysis for years and years and years to come,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s planetary science division director.
Scientists estimate the capsule holds at least a cup of rubble from the carbon-rich asteroid known as Bennu, but would not know for sure until the container is opened. Some spilled and floated away when the spacecraft scooped up too much material, which jammed the container’s lid during the collection three years ago.
Japan, the only other nation to bring back samples, gathered about a teaspoon during a pair of asteroid missions.
The pebbles and dust delivered on Sunday represent the biggest haul from beyond the moon. Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system, the samples would help scientists better understand how Earth and life formed, providing “an extraordinary glimpse” of 4.5 billion years ago, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.
Osiris-Rex, the ship, rocketed away on the US$1 billion mission in 2016. It reached Bennu two years later and, using a long stick vacuum, grabbed rubble from the small roundish space rock in 2020. By the time it returned, the spacecraft had logged 6.2 billion kilometers.
At a news conference, Lauretta said he broke into tears of joy upon hearing that the capsule’s main parachute had opened.
“I knew we had made it home,” he said, so overwhelmed with emotion when he arrived at the scene that he wanted to hug the capsule, sooty, but undamaged, and not even bent.
Flight controllers for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin stood and applauded the touchdown from their base in Colorado. NASA camera views showed the charred capsule upside down on the sand with its parachute disconnected and strewn nearby, as the recovery team moved in via helicopters.
“Boy, did we stick that landing,” Lauretta said. “It didn’t move, it didn’t roll, it didn’t bounce. It just made a tiny little divot in the Utah soil.”
British astronomer Daniel Brown, who was not involved in the mission, said he expects “great things” from NASA’s largest sample return since the Apollo moon landings more than half a century ago.
With these asteroid samples, “we are edging closer to understanding its early chemical composition, the formation of water and the molecules life is based on,” he said from Nottingham Trent University.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS