NASA to share sample retrieval preparation details as OSIRIS-REx spacecraft nears Earth

This week, NASA will be sharing details on how it’s preparing to receive the first set of asteroid samples ever gathered by the agency, an achievement seven years in the making.

Media and NASA experts will gather in Utah’s western desert on Wednesday near the site where the sample capsule will land in under a month’s time to learn about the culmination of the OSIRIS-REx mission.

The asteroid samples have been travelling through space for years to make it back to Earth for analysis. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made contact with the asteroid Bennu more than 200 million miles away back in Oct. 2020, then stored the samples for travel. The sample recovery would not have been possible without the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which provided the OSISIS-REx Laser Altimeter, a key instrument which scanned the surface of the asteroid to pinpoint the best location for sample retrieval.

Now, the long journey is almost over for the sample capsule.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will draw close enough to Earth on Sept. 24 to drop the sample capsule into the atmosphere. If timed correctly, it will land at the Utah Test and Training Range where researchers will be waiting.

NASA will be going over the recovery plans in a news conference that will air on NASA Television, the NASA app and the agency’s website at 5 p.m. EDT on Wednesday.

Scientists across the globe will have the opportunity to study the samples taken from Bennu – including researchers from Canada, which will be receiving a portion of the sample.

Since asteroids are among the oldest objects in our solar system, samples taken from them may be able to provide clues for how Earth evolved and how key elements reached the planet in its earliest days.

Bennu is “especially exciting,” according to the CSA, because it has been around since the formation of the solar system, and has remained largely unchanged, making it a “cosmic time capsule”. If the Bennu samples contain clay minerals or even organic molecules such as amino acids, it could support the theory that the building blocks of life could have been delivered to Earth by an asteroid centuries ago.

If the mission goes off without a hitch, the United States will be the second country to have brought asteroid samples successfully back to Earth. In 2020, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 mission dropped off its sample collection capsule in the Australian outback after it gathered samples from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu in 2018.

A previous Hayabusa mission was carried out in 2010, but a failure of the sampling device meant they only retrieved micrograms of asteroid dust.