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Seven years after it left for the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with a celestial souvenir. On the morning of Sunday, Sept. 24, as it passes by Earth the probe will release a canister holding about 9 ounces of space rock. The container will plummet through the atmosphere, its parachute will unfurl, and it will touch down in the Utah desert at about 8:55 am Mountain time.
A NASA spacecraft zooming toward Earth is on track to fling a capsule the size of an automobile tire onto a Utah bombing range Sunday morning. Inside will be fragments of an asteroid that may contain clues about the origin of life.
"When we get the ... asteroid Bennu back on Earth, we'll be looking at material that existed before our planet, maybe even some grains that existed before our Solar System," says University of Arizona Regents Professor Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator on the mission.
In a historic special delivery spanning seven years and 4 billion miles, an estimated half-pound of rocks from a distant asteroid will drop by parachute into a Utah desert site Sunday morning and be sent to Houston for study.
When the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft swings by Earth on Sunday, it is expected to deliver a rare cosmic gift: a pristine sample collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
This column examines how Hulu's new series "The Other Black Girl" aims to meet the call for Black work-life stories in the media. Stephanie Troutman Robbins, a Black feminist scholar and head of the Gender and Women's Studies department at the University of Arizona, commends recent strides in television to depict issues Black employees face – but she's ready for their workplace stories to take center stage. "I can't think of any show where the primary thing about the Black woman is her career and how she navigates that workspace on a regular basis or as the focus of the show," said Robbins, who co-edited "Race and Ethnicity in American Television: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation," a two-volume encyclopedia published in 2021 that examines five decades of racial representation in the media.
University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins discusses the university's position as a leader in space sciences.
Valley fever's mortality rate runs about one death per 1,000 infections, according to Dr. John Galgiani, director of the University of Arizona Valley Fever Center for Excellence. It doesn't need to be so high. To show that a vaccine could be effective protection against Coccidioides, Galgiani and his team started by focusing on an immunization for dogs with the infection. The canine vaccine Galgiani helped to develop has already proved itself. Galgiani believes that if funding allows, a human version of his vaccine could be ready for approval within eight years.
A NASA spacecraft will fly by Earth on Sunday and drop off what is expected to be at least a cupful of rubble it grabbed from the asteroid Bennu, closing out a seven-year quest. "I ask myself how many heart-pounding moments can you have in one lifetime because I feel like I might be hitting my limit," said the University of Arizona's Dante Lauretta, the mission’s lead scientist.
A new study by University of Arizona researchers shows climate change is causing extinctions at an increasing rate. They surveyed populations of the Yarrow's spiny lizard in 18 mountain ranges in southeastern Arizona and analyzed the rate of climate-related extinction over time. "The magnitude of extinction we found over the past seven years was similar to that seen in other studies that spanned almost 70 years," said John J. Wiens, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the senior author of the study.
