Crossed Wires Led to High Drama as NASA Returned Asteroid Samples to Earth
Freeman writes:
On September 24, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft released the canister containing the asteroid samples to plunge into the Earth's atmosphere, while the mothership steered onto a course to take it safely back into deep space for a follow-up mission to explore a different asteroid at the end of the 2020s.
Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx's principal investigator from the University of Arizona, was a passenger in a US military helicopter circling the capsule's landing zone in the Utah desert.
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For those watching NASA's live video coverage of the OSIRIS-REx mission's return to Earth, there were hints that something was amiss. Video imagery from a NASA tracking airplane showed the capsule tumbling toward the ground at high speed, well after the point when the drogue parachute should have been visible.
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The last time NASA tried to bring extraterrestrial samples back to Earth, the parachute never opened.
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"We're tumbling. We are in a subsonic regime, and we are not stabilized," Lauretta said. "There's no drogue chute deployed here. Problem! So I was like trying to mentally prepare myself, because we're on live TV, to get off this helicopter and deal with a crashed capsule in the desert."Then, Lauretta heard confirmation from the Air Force that the OSIRIS-REx return capsule had unfurled its main parachute.
"I was like, 'What? How is that possible?'" he said.
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