The asteroid sample collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft just experienced its second touchdown in just two days.
The sample — a stash of dirt and gravel that the probe snagged from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 — touched down within the Utah desert on Sunday (Sept. 24), thrilling mission team members and scientists around the globe.
However the asteroid sample stayed within the Beehive State for only a day before boarding a plane to its final destination, which it reached today (Sept. 25).
“Welcome to Houston, OSIRIS-REx! The asteroid sample arrived today in Texas where it can be curated and preserved by our team here at Johnson. The knowledge collected could help scientists around the globe investigate planetary formation, the origins of life and the way asteroids might impact Earth,” NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC), which relies in Houston, said today in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Related: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey
OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu, a 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid, in December 2018. The probe studied Bennu up close for 22 months, then swooped in to grab a sample — marking the very first time a NASA probe had managed to gather pieces of an asteroid in space.
That dive revealed Bennu’s surface to be surprisingly spongy; OSIRIS-REx sank far into the asteroid before backing away to safety.
OSIRIS-REx left Bennu in May 2021, starting a protracted journey back to Earth. At 6:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT) on Sunday, the probe released its sample capsule, which got here all the way down to Earth on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range about 4 hours later — just as planned.
The Bennu sample will now make its approach to a newly built curation facility at JSC managed by the agency’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division.
The OSIRIS-REx science team — which incorporates greater than 200 people based at 35 institutions around the globe — will then study the sample for about two years in an effort to satisfy the mission’s primary science goals. Because the above JSC post noted, those goals include higher understanding how the solar system formed and evolved and the role carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu can have played in delivering life’s constructing blocks to Earth.
The science team could have access to about 25% of the Bennu material, which is believed to weigh about 8.8 ounces (250 grams). 4 percent of the sample will go to the Canadian Space Agency, which provided OSIRIS-REx’s laser altimeter instrument.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will get 0.5% of the fabric, as a part of a take care of NASA that features collaboration between OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission, which returned a small sample of the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in December 2020.
The remaining 70% of the Bennu sample will remain at JSC “for study by scientists not yet born, using technologies not yet invented, to reply fundamental questions on the solar system,” in keeping with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return press kit.