NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission delivery is set for September 24 and will parachute down somewhere into the Utah desert. This would mark the first-ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth, with OSIRIS-REx having been in space for the past seven years, including a touchdown on Bennu.
After the spacecraft touches down, NASA will be racing against the clock to recover it safely and get the sample(s) back to a temporary clean room for inspection. Before that happens, the OSIRIS-REx team aims to practice and refine procedures required to recover the sample in Utah and transport it to a new lab built specially for the material at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Once that happens, scientists will carefully open the sample container and distribute up to a quarter of it to the OSIRIS-REx science team around the world for analysis.
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The OSIRIS-REx team has already performed amazing feats characterizing and sampling asteroid Bennu. These accomplishments are the direct result of the extensive training and rehearsals that we performed every step of the way. We are bringing that level of discipline and dedication to this final phase of the flight operations,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator from the University of Arizona, Tucson.
