We Did It! OSIRIS-REx Successfully Returned Asteroid Samples This Sunday
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OSIRIS-REx will deliver its asteroid sample to Earth this Sunday morning.
The mission is returning samples of the asteroid Bennu via a sample capsule that it will drop from its in-space flightpath.
OSIRIS-REx will then carry on to its new research target, the asteroid Apophis, hopefully leaving scientists on Earth with an exciting new bounty of samples.
OSIRIS-REx has finally brought its payload home. On Sunday, the mission—which endeavored to study and collect samples from the asteroid Bennu—dropped its payload off as it swings by Earth its way to its next research target, the asteroid Apophis.
After a nail-biting process, the delivery was deemed a resounding success. The capsule containing the samples is currently in a clean room to be opened (hopefully) either later today or tomorrow. Inside lay pieces of the Solar System from when it was first forming—pieces of history untainted by Earth. Researchers can’t wait to get their hands on them.
“Today capped the end of an almost 20-year adventure for me,” Dante Lauretta, leader of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, told NPR. “I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people to lay eyes on the capsule, and boy did we stick that landing.”
This sample delivery is a long time in the making. OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer, originally launched in 2016, and landed on Bennu two years later. It then spent two years studying the asteroid and collecting samples before blasting off back to Earth. Though there have been two previous asteroid sample return missions, this is the first NASA mission take a crack at the feat.
The main probe itself, however, is not actually landing on Earth. While it continues on its merry way, it will drop a capsule intended to land out in the Utah desert. The capsule will plummet through our atmosphere until its parachute deploys, and it—hopefully—experiences a relatively “soft” landing.
The whole thing requires incredibly precise positioning and timing, and considering how long it took to collect this sample, there’s a lot on the line here. Many scientists have been eagerly awaiting the return of these samples so they can get a firsthand look at the makeup of the asteroid—a very uncommon privilege.
Everyone is hoping very hard that everything goes according to plan. But while this section of OSIRIS-REx’s mission is an all-or-nothing endeavor, the rest of it certainly has not been. The mission has already taught us a lot about asteroids in its two years sitting on top of one.
Arguably most surprising were the boulders on its surface. When first set off for Bennu, researchers assumed that the surface would by-and-large be sandy and rubble-y. But instead, upon arrival, the probe discovered huge boulders covering the landscape—boulders that were bigger than they ever could have been on Earth given their compositions.
These boulders, according to a 2022 study, have been serving as space airbags for the asteroid, absorbing some of the impact of other space objects set on a collision course. “You can have an impact or strike a boulder and that porous boulder might potentially totally disrupt,” Edward Beau Bierhaus, an OSIRIS-REx research scientist, said in a Space.com article. “But in doing so, it absorbs the energy of that impact so that it doesn't transmit into the rest of the body.”
Throughout the rest of its analysis, OSIRIS-REx revealed more and more of the surprising complexity of asteroids—complexity that is about to be able to explore even further. The sample currently awaits division and distribution to the many scientists eager to start learning about Bennu live and in person. A quarter retained for the OSIRIS-REx team itself to investigate.
For now, we celebrate a huge success. “It was amazing and emotional. I've been emotional all day and that was one of the key moments for me,” Lauretta told NPR.
“It's the end of a journey,” he said, “and the beginning of a new one.”
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