This was the moment Dante Lauretta had waited for nearly 20 years to see. A small robotic capsule was on the way back to Earth with rocks scooped from an asteroid, and Lauretta was eager to get his hands on the samples.<\/p>\n
Led by Lauretta, scientists carefully designed the billion-dollar mission to bring home pieces of a carbon-rich asteroid thought to contain organic molecules, the building blocks necessary for life to take hold. This NASA mission, known by the acronym OSIRIS-REx, launched from Earth in 2016, collected samples from a roughly 1,600-foot-wide (500-meter) asteroid named Bennu in 2020, then set a course for return to Earth.<\/p>\n
On September 24, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft released the canister containing the asteroid samples to plunge into the Earth\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx\u2019s principal investigator from the University of Arizona, was a passenger in a US military helicopter circling the capsule\u2019s landing zone in the Utah desert. A heat shield protected the capsule from temperatures that built up to more than 5,000\u00b0 Fahrenheit during reentry.<\/p>\n
Then, a small drogue parachute was supposed to open to stabilize the 32-inch-wide (81-centimeter) sample return craft. About five minutes later, a larger main chute would open to slow the capsule for a gentle landing while protecting the precious asteroid material sealed inside.<\/p>\n
At least, that was the plan. While OSIRIS-REx safely returned its asteroid sample to Earth, there were moments of high drama.<\/p>\n
For those watching NASA\u2019s live video coverage of the OSIRIS-REx mission\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Inside a nearby helicopter, Lauretta was waiting for verbal updates on the status of the capsule.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI heard the 100,000-foot crossing, and no drogue, and the drogue chute is supposed to come out at 100,000 feet,\u201d he recalled during a presentation last month to the National Academies\u2019 Space Studies Board. \u201cSixty-thousand feet, no drogue. I\u2019m like, \u2018Ugh, this isn\u2019t good.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The last time NASA tried to bring extraterrestrial samples back to Earth, the parachute never opened. The robotic Genesis mission ended with an uncontrolled impact in Utah, rupturing the capsule bringing back microscopic particles collected from the solar wind. Scientists were able to salvage some of the specimens, but it wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n
Lauretta described a crash like the one experienced by NASA\u2019s Genesis mission as the \u201cworst-case scenario\u201d for OSIRIS-REx. In that event, scientists would need to scramble to gather as much of the asteroid sample as possible from the Utah desert. Anything salvaged would need to be carefully checked for contamination from Earth\u2019s soils and life-forms.<\/p>\n
You can watch a replay of OSIRIS-REx\u2019s landing below.<\/p>\n