Drop Zone Utah: Preparing To Recover OSIRIS-REx’s Asteroid Samples

Call it a motherlode of extraterrestrial freight. A package of asteroid samples is headed for a parachute landing in Utah next month. Those cosmic collectibles come courtesy of a seven-year journey by NASA’s Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer. This spacecraft, mercifully word-manicured down to OSIRIS-REx, was hurled from Earth in September 2016. In 2020 the craft gathered bits and pieces of space rock Bennu, an ancient rubble pile of diverse leftovers from the early days of the solar system’s creation, about 4.5 billion years ago.