On Sunday a University of Arizona-led spacecraft mission will drop a capsule at supersonic speeds into Earth’s atmosphere for a landing in the Utah desert. The capsule carries a sample of asteroid rubble that contains clues to the origins of the solar system. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with the OSIRIS-REX principal investigator Dante (dawn-tay) Lauretta about his hopes for this long-awaited sample return.
Walk me through exactly how this is going to work. So the spacecraft is whistling by and it’s got to get that asteroid sample down to Earth.
That’s right. So the spacecraft is on an intercept course with Earth right now… We will go through all of the criteria, make sure everybody is safe, make sure the capsule will survive, and then we’ll get the official “go” from NASA to release the capsule…. It will travel four hours through near-Earth space, hitting the top of atmosphere right around 8:30 in the morning Utah time. It’s about 13 minutes of flight through the atmosphere and the final few minutes are on parachute. We expect it to come down for a relatively gentle landing in the Utah desert.
And if all goes well, it’s going to be stuffed full of asteroid material, right?
Hopefully it’s already stuffed full of asteroid material! If all goes well, we will safely deliver the asteroid material that we collected in 2020 to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where we have a brand new curation laboratory ready to receive and begin the somewhat arduous process of disassembling all the flight hardware to get at the sample which is pretty well protected deep inside the capsule itself.
What are you hoping to learn from that material? We’re talking about rocks and dust collected from the asteroid Bennu.
Asteroid Bennu is interesting for a couple of reasons. It’s a near Earth asteroid, it’s one of the closest objects to the Earth. In fact it comes really close to our planet every six years, such that it tops NASA’s potentially hazardous asteroid list. We’re interested in its future orbital trajectory, and it turns out its thermal properties play a key role in understanding where it’s going to be in the future… and the likelihood that it might impact the Earth. But more importantly, especially for me, it’s the “origins” investigation. Bennu—the minerals, its chemicals—they were formed over 4.5 billion years ago at the very dawn of our solar system, and they represent the kinds of materials that were available to the surface of the early Earth. They likely contain the water that’s in our oceans, the molecules that are in the air that we breathe, and maybe even organic compounds that triggered the origin of life on our planet. So we’re really addressing that fundamental question that we ask ourselves: where did we come from?
Why is that important to you personally? In all that has happened on our planet in the last two decades since this mission was first envisioned, why take the time to ask those big questions?
I think everybody asks themselves, what’s our history? You may answer that through genealogy, trying to understand your ancestors and where they came from. We really find value in the efforts of the people that came before us, and building on their legacy as we hopefully generate a better future for our descendants. This investigation kind of takes that all the way back to the very beginning, to understanding that first biological system that gave rise to all life on Earth. And it also leads to an even more profound question: are we alone in the universe?
That’s exciting. Back to the sample return this weekend, how are you feeling now that this moment is here?
I’m feeling actually a little more relaxed than I have been for a while. We successfully executed the penultimate maneuver of the OSIRIS-REx prime mission, Trajectory Correction Maneuver Number 12, which did fine targeting to make sure we’re coming right into the area of Utah that we’re ready for. With that maneuver a bunch of stress slid away. We have done everything we can do at this point; we’ve passed every test, we’ve gone through every rehearsal…. Everything looks great… So I’m kind of just looking forward to enjoying the next week as the major events of my career finally play out.
Congratulations, and I’ll be watching online and crossing my fingers for you. It was great to talk to you today.
Thanks, Melissa.
NASA's live coverage of the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) capsule landing starts at 7 a.m. Arizona time (8 a.m. MDT/10 a.m. EDT) and will air on NASA TV, the NASA app and the agency's website. Watch online at https://www.nasa.gov/live.
In addition to the English broadcast, NASA will stream coverage in Spanish of the landing beginning at 7 a.m. Arizona time (8 a.m. MDT/10 a.m. EDT) on X, Facebook and YouTube.
