First Sample Of Rock And Dust From Asteroid Lands In Utah
In a historic achievement for NASA, the first sample of rock and dust from an asteroid has landed on earth.
A capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu landed at 10:52 a.m. ET on Sunday at the U.S. Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City.
While piercing the atmosphere, the capsule was traveling at a speed of 27,650 mph.
Within an hour and a half, the capsule was transported by helicopter to a temporary clean room set up in a hangar on the training range, where it now is connected to a continuous flow of nitrogen, NASA said.
Nitrogen is a gas that doesn’t interact with most other chemicals, and a continuous flow of it into the sample container inside the capsule will keep out earthly contaminants to leave the sample pure for scientific analyses.
The returned samples will help scientists worldwide make discoveries to better understand planet formation and the origin of organics and water that led to life on Earth. It will also benefit the study about potentially hazardous asteroids.
The asteroid sample collection was the result of years of hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) team.
“Congratulations to the OSIRIS-REx team on a picture-perfect mission – the first American asteroid sample return in history – which will deepen our understanding of the origin of our solar system and its formation,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Bennu is a potentially hazardous asteroid, and what we learn from the sample will help us better understand the types of asteroids that could come our way.”
The sample, which is estimated to weigh 250 grams, will be transported in its unopened canister by aircraft to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday, according to the U.S. space agency. Curation scientists there will disassemble the canister, extract and weigh the sample, create an inventory of the rocks and dust, and, over time, distribute pieces of Bennu to scientists worldwide.
The delivery of an asteroid sample – a first for the U.S. – went according to plan thanks to the massive effort of hundreds of people who remotely directed the spacecraft’s journey since it launched on September 8, 2016.
To mark the scientific achievement, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp featuring an artist’s impression of the sample capsule as it parachutes to Earth over its landing site.
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