After a journey of 6.5 billion kilometers through space: dramatic landing of asteroid dust on Earth today

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It’s a historic moment: After a journey of seven years and 4 billion miles through space, a space probe will drop rock material from a distant asteroid in a US desert on Sunday.

More than 250 grams of rock is said to float to the ground in a round, rubbery capsule attached to a parachute in the state of Utah. The samples were taken from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. Osiris-Rex is the first NASA mission attempt to recover samples from an asteroid.

Spectacular monster

The spacecraft failed to land on Bennu in December 2019. It came close enough to the celestial body to extend a 3.4-meter-long robotic arm and touch the surface for about five seconds.

The scientists discovered that Bennu’s surface was not tightly, but loosely packed. Instead of bouncing off the surface, the robotic arm sank into the asteroid with little resistance.

They managed to scrape material from Bennu and collect it in a container equipped with a heat shield. The intention is for this container to land somewhere in a desert area of ​​almost 800 square kilometers next Sunday, probably at 4:55 PM Swiss time.

Will asteroid endanger Earth within a century?

Bennu is rich in carbon and is considered a remnant from the time when the solar system was formed. The asteroid is considered a kind of time capsule that could provide information about the origins of life. They are geological materials that were formed before the Earth even existed.

The space rock should not only give scientists clues about the formation of the Earth. Bennu is also being studied to better understand other asteroids and their movements in space. The information collected by Osiris-Rex could help develop future technologies to neutralize asteroids that threaten to collide with Earth.

Bennu is considered one of the most potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids in the solar system. It comes closest to Earth every six years. According to NASA, it could fly closer to Earth than the moon by 2135.

A quarter kilo of perfect universal material

Bennu was discovered in 1999 and is believed to be part of a larger asteroid that collided with another space rock. It is about 800 meters wide, 400 meters high and half a kilometer long – a small thing compared to planets. The black surface is strewn with boulders and rotates around the sun every fourteen months.

This isn’t the first rock sample from an asteroid to reach Earth. Japan successfully returned microscopic grains from asteroid Itokawa to Earth in 2010 and samples from asteroid Ryugu in 2019. But at the time it was about grams, and not a whole quarter of a kilogram, from the distant universe, preserved in pristine condition and waiting to be analyzed by scientists.

The space probe’s mission is not over yet. Today it will fly by Earth and drop the asteroid material. The space capsule will then travel to Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid, and study it for 18 months. (kes)

Source: Blick