An area capsule with filth and rocks collected from an asteroid has returned safely to Earth. Scientists eagerly anticipate what the samples may inform them about Earth’s origins and the galaxy.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
A NASA spacecraft has returned to Earth carrying about eight ounces of rock and mud, sufficient to fill a cup. And scientists are thrilled as a result of these black rocks are items of an asteroid. They’ve arrange a laboratory simply to check these things, and NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce reviews that this week, scientists start to just do that.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: These rocks are older than the Earth. They’re relics from the early photo voltaic system when planets have been forming. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent seven years touring over a billion miles by house to get these asteroid rocks. Yesterday morning, it shot them in direction of dwelling in a pattern return capsule.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: EDL milestone – we now have confirmed parachute deployment.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: This was the second that Dante Lauretta says he let loose all of the feelings he’d been holding in. He is a College of Arizona scientist who leads this NASA mission. It is consumed almost 20 years of his life. He knew the parachute would maintain the capsule and its treasured cargo from crashing and being destroyed.
DANTE LAURETTA: , tears have been streaming down my eyes. I used to be like, OK, that is the one factor I wanted to listen to. From this level on, we all know what to do. We’re protected. We’re dwelling. We did it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Landing. I repeat, EDL – SRC has touched down.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: After the capsule landed, Lauretta helicoptered over a desert out to the place it was sitting on the bottom at a army vary in Utah. It regarded like a mini-UFO, charred and blackened from its fiery journey by the environment.
LAURETTA: It was like seeing an previous good friend that you just hadn’t seen for a very long time.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says he wished he may give it a hug. He says there isn’t any hazard that there is any alien life inside.
LAURETTA: In actual fact, we’re extra frightened about Earth’s biology contaminating the pattern.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: As a result of one of many key science targets is to see if carbon-rich asteroids may need delivered among the chemical substances that led to life on Earth. To maintain the pattern pristine, the canister stuffed with rocks will solely be opened inside a particular lab constructed to check them at NASA’s Johnson House Middle in Houston. Lauretta says the plan is to start out analyzing among the materials on Tuesday.
LAURETTA: So I’ve to be affected person, and I am actually exercising persistence. I perceive we have to go methodically, systematically, by the {hardware}. We have now a really well-defined process.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says, in contrast to a child at Christmas, he cannot simply give the bundle a shake to get a way of what treasure may be hidden inside.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR Information.
(SOUNDBITE OF DEREK FIECHTER AND BRANDON FIECHTER’S “INTO THE UNKNOWN”)
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