NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flung a capsule the size of a car tire onto a bombing range in Utah on Sunday, delivering safely to Earth a sample of the intriguing and potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu.
The capsule, released four hours earlier by the spacecraft, parachuted onto the Utah Test and Training Range. Recovery teams in four helicopters raced to the landing site in a carefully rehearsed effort designed to bag the capsule quickly to lower the risk of contamination.
They found the capsule on the desert floor, intact and sitting perfectly upright, as if it had taken pains to be presentable. A helicopter hauled the capsule on a 100-foot line to a specially prepared “clean room” in a military hangar. It will be flown Monday to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas for scientific study.
Mission managers, pleased with the trajectory of the spacecraft, had voted early Sunday morning to proceed with releasing the capsule. It spent four hours nearing Earth before plunging into the atmosphere at 27,000 miles per hour. The parent spacecraft then fired thrusters to ensure that it would not wind up in Utah, but would instead move on to another target, the asteroid Apophis, with a scheduled encounter in 2029.
