Largest Asteroid Sample Ever Collected Is Coming Down to Earth
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Chunks of asteroid that could tell us about the earliest days of the 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and the possible origins of water on our planet are set to land in the Utah desert Sunday.It's a moment more than a decade in the making for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx. Its goal was to scoop up a large sample of rocks and dust from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and bring it to our planet to study. The spacecraft successfully snagged its prize in 2020 and this weekend will finally pass by Earth and release a capsule containing the sample and send it careening down to Utah. “This is, of course, the moment we've all been waiting for,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Science Mission Directorate's Planetary Science Division. The sample will help scientists get a snapsho...