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Scientists are exulting over the safe arrival of a canister containing about a cup's worth of asteroid rocks, collected 200 million miles away, that landed in a Utah desert after a 7-year NASA mission sent to retrieve them.
NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.
The seven-year OSIRIS-REx mission ended on Sunday with the return of regolith from the asteroid Bennu, which might hold clues about the origins of our solar system and life.
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.
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.
