University of Arizona in the News

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission brought back asteroid samples untainted by Earth's atmosphere. Jessica Barnes with the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is interviewed.

Ice and minerals on the Moon could help humanity travel to distant planets and asteroids. University of Arizona associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering Jekan Thanga, head of the Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration Laboratory and the NASA-supported ASTEROIDS laboratory, discusses how lunar resources could speed future space travel and change life on Earth.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission has successfully delivered a sample of Asteroid Bennu back to Earth.

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 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 first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.

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.

A Pew Research Center report released last week finds most Latinos in the U.S. don't consider speaking Spanish strictly necessary for someone to being considered Hispanic. In Arizona, English literacy tests were required in order to vote for much of the 20th century, and public school teachers across the American Southwest employed corporal punishment to keep Spanish-speaking children from speaking their native tongue. As a result, many Hispanics who lived through those experiences chose not to teach their children Spanish, to save them the humiliation they endured.

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 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.