In September, a strange container parachuted into the Utah desert. Scientists couldn’t wait to open the capsule. What was inside?
“There’s a whole treasure chest of
The capsule contained pebbles and dust from a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid named Bennu. The samples are the first that NASA, the U.S. space agency, has ever collected from an asteroid.
NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2016. It reached Bennu two years later. The spacecraft spent another two years taking photos and searching for the best spot to gather samples.
In 2020, the spacecraft’s robotic arm carefully scooped up the samples. A few months later, OSIRIS-REx began the long trip back toward Earth. It dropped off the sealed capsule as it zoomed past our planet.
