Osiris Rex is a grand adventure of exploration in deep space.

We built a robotic spacecraft and we launched it off the Earth, and we sent it to a near-earth asteroid named Benu.

This is NASA's curious universe.

Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast,

NASA is your tour guide. NASA has sent a robotic spacecraft billions of kilometers from Earth

to do something we've never done before. Collect a sample of an asteroid. In this episode, we're exploring asteroid Benu, the target of our

Osiris Rex mission. October 20th, 2020 is the culmination of an enormous amount of work by thousands

of people all around the planet. We are getting ready to send our spacecraft down to the surface of asteroid

Benu to collect our sample. That's Dante Loretta. He's the principal investigator on the Osiris

Rex mission. He's been with the team since the very beginning, 2004, preparing for this exact

moment. Our goal is to get the treasure off the surface of that asteroid.

We're scientists and we're geologists and our treasure is in the form of rocks.

But these aren't just any rocks.

These are very special rocks.

These are rocks that are older than the Earth that date from the formation of the solar system and they hold

clues to why the Earth is a habitable planet, why we have oceans here, and maybe why the

origin of life occurred. So we have the amazing objective of bringing those rocks back to

the surface of the Earth so we can get them into our laboratories

and study them in great detail.

It's the first time an American spacecraft

will attempt to collect a sample of an asteroid

and deliver it to Earth.

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