NASA's Asteroid Sample is About to Plunge 63K Miles to Earth

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The crewless spacecraft has traveled 4.4 billion miles through space over the past seven years on a quest to visit a near-Earth asteroid. The robot reached its destination, Bennu, and collected gravel - perhaps about a cup's worth - in October 2020.

Now that the spacecraft is closing in on Earth, the team will attempt to bring that sample all the way home by dropping the capsule 63,000 miles above the planet - about one-third the distance from Earth to the moon. The ground target is just 250 square miles, in a high mountain desert of Utah.

"It's the equivalent of throwing a dart across the length of a basketball court and hitting the bulls-eye," said Rich Burns, NASA's project manager.

If it works, OSIRIS-Rex will be the first U.S. mission to return an asteroid sample.

[...] Not since the Apollo moon rocks, collected between 1969 and 1972, has NASA brought back space souvenirs of this magnitude. Japan's space agency, JAXA, on the other hand, has retrieved smaller asteroid samples twice already, from Itokawa and Ryugu.

[...] Bennu earned the nickname "the trickster asteroid" because it has baffled the team throughout the mission. Scientists believed that when the spacecraft touched down to collect the sample three years ago, it would encounter a solid surface. Instead, the asteroid responded to the spacecraft more like a fluid, or a child's ball pit.

[...] By probing a sample of Bennu, the team is poised to chip away at big questions, like how do organic materials originate, and why did life emerge on Earth? Scientists still don't fully grasp how to get from simple carbon molecules, like the natural gas methane, to complex ones, such as amino acids that make proteins and nucleic acid that makes up genetic material, Lauretta said.

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