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DUGWAY — An asteroid landed in the Utah desert Sunday morning — a piece of it, at least — as NASA scientists successfully completed the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid.
The sample capsule landed at the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range at 8:52 a.m., ending a seven-year journey to the asteroid Bennu and back, and completing a major step in a mission roughly 20 years in the making.
Scientists were working Sunday to carefully prepare and package the sample at a cleanroom at the Dugway Proving Ground, about 85 miles west of Salt Lake City. They will fly the sample to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston via C-17 cargo plane on Monday to be analyzed, preserved and shared with other organizations.
The mission, a joint effort between NASA and the University of Arizona, marks the largest asteroid sample ever returned to Earth. It's also the first asteroid sample mission for the U.S., and the third in the world, following two similar missions by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency over the past 13 years.
Timeline to Earth
Anjani Polit, mission implementations engineer for OSIRIS-REx at University of Arizona, said Sunday morning that the timeline for the mission went "perfectly."
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft released the sample capsule at 4:42 a.m. at approximately 63,000 miles above Earth's surface. At 8:42 a.m., the capsule entered Earth's atmosphere at 433,000 feet above the San Francisco coast, traveling at approximately 27,650 miles per hour, and heating up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, charring its outer layer.
The capsule's cover was ejected at 102,300 feet above Earth, deploying a smaller drogue parachute to inflate and stabilize the capsule. At around 20,000 feet above the surface, the parachute was cut away and the main parachute was successfully deployed, slowing the capsule's speed to just 11 miles per hour.
"I cried like a baby," said Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx principal investigator from the University of Arizona, after he saw the parachute deploy. "It was overwhelming relief, gratitude, pride, awe and really trying to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming."
Lauretta, one of the first to witness the capsule, called the experience "pulse-pounding."
"I couldn't be more proud," Lauretta said. "Just to remind you, not only did we bring this mission in on schedule, under budget, and delivered more science than we had even thought was possible with the encounter with Bennu — but we think we've gotten a lot of sample in that science canister, and we can't wait to crack into it."
The main parachute was initially meant to deploy at 5,050 feet, and its early deployment is what led to a slightly earlier landing time of 8:52 a.m. instead of 8:55 a.m. The capsule landed in the middle of a 37-mile by 9-mile oval at the test range.
The sample capsule is the size of a large car tire, weighs approximately 110 pounds and is covered in a cork-based thermal material to protect the sample from heat.
Recovery operations
Four helicopters visited the landing site following the sample capsule's arrival Sunday. A recovery team wore gas masks for their protection as they worked to recover the capsule, along with nearby soil and air samples for analysis.
The capsule was wrapped in thermal blanketing and towed via helicopter to a portable cleanroom facility on site, landing around 10:38 a.m. The cleanroom will let the recovery team minimize contamination using a nitrogen purge as they remove the sample canister from the capsule to send to Houston Monday.
"The entry into the cleanroom has gone extremely well," said Eileen Stansbery, chief scientist at NASA's Johnston Space Center, adding that the canister was purged just before 1 p.m. Sunday. "We now have a continuous flow of nitrogen within that science canister, and we are well on the way to getting that science canister ready for transport down to the Johnson Space Center."
In Houston, the sample will be separated into parts to be studied and shared. Around 75% will be preserved in a vault in White Sands, New Mexico, to be studied by future generations with better technology for analyzing space samples. This is the same protocol followed with samples from NASA's moon landing missions.
The rest of the sample will be studied at NASA and shared with international institutions including Canada, in exchange for the laser altimeter it provided that helped map out Bennu; and with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, in exchange for the Ryugu asteroid sample it shared with NASA after its 2021 mission.
Significance
Analyzing the sample will help scientists not only understand the origin of life in the universe, but hopefully also how common it is for life to form throughout the galaxy.
It will also help them prepare for the future, including "understanding our cosmic neighborhood and understanding any potential threats from outer space that we might need to deal with in the future," Lauretta said during a July 20 media briefing at Dugway.
"This is the most dangerous rock in the solar system," Lauretta said of Bennu. The asteroid, around 500 meters in diameter, is the most likely of any asteroid to hit Earth. But it likely won't do it until the late 22nd century, if it hits Earth at all.
"Likelihood is low, consequences are high — we have to do something to understand it," he said.
Why Utah?
This isn't the first time the Utah Test and Training Range has been used as a landing site. NASA's Genesis mission in 2004 and Stardust mission in 2006 both brought pieces of comets back to the Utah desert.
"Utah's becoming the place to drop capsules from outer space in the United States," Lauretta said.
Scott Dixon, public affairs specialist at Dugway, said the proving ground was founded in 1942 in response to the need for higher defense shown by the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
It's about the same square mileage as Rhode Island, and far from populated areas, making it the perfect place to test biochemical weapons to improve the nation's defense — but also making it the perfect place to land space equipment.
Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, visited the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City Thursday to encourage Utahns to watch the landing and celebrate their role.
"This is an amazing thing that's going to be influencing science for decades and decades to come, and the fact that Utah and Utahns have a critical role — we have to land these samples somewhere safe, and this is a great place to do that," Glaze said.
After the landing on Sunday, Glaze added, "What you saw today, everything that you saw, could not have happened without the amazing partnership between NASA and Department of Defense, including Hill Air Force Base, Dugway Proving Ground and the Utah Test and Training Range."
What's next?
The aircraft used for OSIRIS-REx isn't done yet. After dropping off its capsule Sunday, without landing, it embarked on mission OSIRIS-APEX to explore the asteroid Apophis.
The OSIRIS-REx mission also marks a unique turning point for NASA, as it entails many firsts for the agency, Lauretta said. Along with collecting the United States' first asteroid sample, this mission has included a new level of contamination control and better documentation of samples that he said will "become the agency standard moving forward."
"I really am looking forward to the next stages of this journey," Lauretta said Sunday.
NASA is scheduled to reveal the asteroid sample to the public on their live stream Oct. 11.
