University of Arizona in the News

On Sunday, NASA's OSIRIS-REx dropped off a capsule containing rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu at the Department of Defense Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City. Meanwhile, the spacecraft, now renamed OSIRIS-APEX, embarked on a new journey to study the asteroid Apophis. "Successfully delivering samples from Bennu to Earth is a triumph of collaborative ingenuity and a testament to what we can accomplish when we unite with a common purpose.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.