After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security—Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu returned to Earth on Sept. 24 in a targeted area of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City.
A few hours before the landing, OSIRIS-REx took some of its final views of its own sample return capsule.
Following a flight aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft on Sept. 26, the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule was taken into a customized clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Meanwhile, the OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft—on a new mission with a new name—is on a course toward asteroid Apophis, which it will reach in 2029.
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft views sample return capsule’s departure (2023, October 4)
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