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On Sunday, a capsule carrying a one-of-a-kind sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu careened through the atmosphere and landed in the Utah desert. But the OSIRIS-REx mission isn’t quite over: That precious cargo needs to be kept safe, then carefully opened one step at a time, before any science can be done.
Technicians at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will now begin dismantling the capsule, piece by piece, to get down to an interior canister containing the asteroid sample. The methodical process is so that someone doesn’t accidentally harm the canister or compromise future scientific research. “We are really excited and impatient to see the sample, but we’re patient enough to open it progressively and ensure it’s safe and pristine,” says Pierre Haenecour, a co-investigator in the OSIRIS-REx collaboration. He’s a member of the quick-look team at Johnson that will do the initial imaging and chemical analysis of any fine particles that are clinging to the outside of the canister.
Inside, that canister could hold as much as 9 ounces (250 grams) of space rocks and dust. Bennu is a lifeless rock, and Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist and head of the OSIRIS-REx team, emphasizes that they’re not expecting to find biological material. “No life forms that we know of could survive that kind of environment. We’re more worried about Earth biology contaminating the sample,” he said at a NASA post-landing press conference on Sunday. Still, Bennu is a carbon-rich asteroid that has been around for billions of years and could reveal information about the assembly of rocky planets—including Earth—in the early solar system.
After a pulse-pounding descent, during which the atmosphere heated the capsule to a scorching 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it touched down—charred but intact—at 8:52 am Mountain time at a Department of Defense testing range in Utah. Military personnel were charged with checking that no unexploded ordnance lay within the landing area and that no toxic gases were emanating from the still-hot craft.
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The NASA recovery team began by taking samples of the desert ground and atmosphere where the capsule landed. Then they gingerly loaded it onto a helicopter and transported it to a temporary clean room in a hangar on the training range. In the clean room, personnel wore bunny suits covering their clothing, shoes, and hair to ensure that fabric fibers, hair, and skin cells didn’t contaminate the container. They opened the top of the capsule and conducted a nitrogen purge, pumping in gas to make sure that contaminants like oxygen, moisture, and earthly bacteria don’t somehow make their way inside.
On Monday, they flew the partially opened capsule on a Boeing transport aircraft to a clean room at Johnson Space Center’s curation facility. There they'll continue taking apart the capsule over the next few days. The interior canister will be moved to a “glovebox,” a sealed container filled with hydrogen that technicians can access only by sticking their gloved hands through a partition. They will also remove the collector head of the robotic arm that snagged the sample and place it in another dedicated glovebox.
On October 11, NASA plans a public reveal of what’s inside the canister. While it will take some time to do in-depth studies of that main sample, the reveal may include Haenecour’s team’s preliminary findings about dust particles on the canister’s exterior. This dust would have attached to the container in 2020, when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft grabbed the sample—and nearly spilled it into space.
Once the canister is finally opened, the curatorial team at Johnson plans to divvy up the valuable rocks among some 200 scientists worldwide. “These samples are an amazing treasure trove for generations of scientists,” said Eileen Stansbury, a chief scientist at Johnson, during Sunday’s news conference. If all goes well, those samples will last for decades and can be used as new analysis tools are developed. (A half century after the Apollo program, scientists are still doing research using lunar regolith samples, like for a recent study about growing plants on the moon.)
OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first asteroid sample return, and the capsule is expected to harbor a much larger sample than those brought back by the Japanese space agency’s Hayabusa missions, which visited the asteroids Ryugu and Itokawa.
NASA has more sample-return projects in the works. That includes collaborating with Japan’s MMX mission, which will launch next year to visit the Martian moon Phobos and return a sample in 2029. NASA will also use the Artemis program’s planned lunar landing in 2026 to dig up new moon samples, and the agency intends to bring back regolith from Mars, which is being collected by the Perseverance rover.
