NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flung a capsule the dimensions of a automotive tire onto a bombing vary in Utah on Sunday, delivering safely to Earth a pattern of the intriguing and doubtlessly hazardous asteroid Bennu.
The capsule, launched 4 hours earlier by the spacecraft, parachuted onto the Utah Test and Training Range. Recovery groups in 4 helicopters raced to the touchdown website in a rigorously rehearsed effort designed to bag the capsule rapidly to decrease the danger of contamination.
They discovered the capsule on the desert ground, intact and sitting completely upright, as if it had taken pains to be presentable. A helicopter hauled the capsule on a 100-foot line to a specifically ready “clean room” in a army hangar. It can be flown Monday to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas for scientific examine.
Mission managers, happy with the trajectory of the spacecraft, had voted early Sunday morning to proceed with releasing the capsule. It spent 4 hours nearing Earth earlier than plunging into the environment at 27,000 miles per hour. The mum or dad spacecraft then fired thrusters to make sure that it could not wind up in Utah, however would as a substitute transfer on to a different goal, the asteroid Apophis, with a scheduled encounter in 2029.