Asteroid Tag

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

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4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A billion-dollar spacecraft, a daring deep-space mission, and one of humanity’s biggest questions: Where did we come from? NASA’s OSIRIS-REx set out to collect a pristine sample from asteroid Bennu, a cosmic time capsule that may hold clues to the origins of life in our solar system. But the journey was anything but easy.

Guests:

Erica Jawin, postdoctoral research geologist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and member of the OSIRIS-REx mission

Tim McCoy, curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and deputy mission sample scientist for the OSIRIS-REx mission

Mike Moreau, deputy project manager in the Space Science Mission Operations Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.
0:13.3	I'm Lizzie Peabody.
0:31.6	When Erica Jowen first saw the asteroid, it didn't look like much, just a bright grain of sand in the abyss. Oh, very poetic. Yeah, exactly like that.
0:34.6	It started out as just basically one pixel.
0:38.3	It was just, you know, a white pixel on a black background.
0:40.6	That's not really much of anything.
0:42.9	Erica is a postdoctoral research geologist at the Spesonians and National Air and Space Museum.
0:48.6	And she was finally getting a look at an asteroid she'd spent years studying from afar.
0:54.9	And then the spacecraft got closer, so then it went from one pixel to four pixels and
0:59.0	then to nine pixels.
1:00.6	The spacecraft taking these pictures was Osiris Rex.
1:05.3	After two years of hurtling through space, it was closing in on its target, the asteroid named Benu.
1:12.6	The rocks on this asteroid were older than anything on Earth and could hold clues about the origin of life in our solar system,
1:22.6	if we could only get our hands on some, which was the whole point of this mission.
1:30.2	So the plan is the spacecraft would arrive at Benu.
1:33.9	You would see all these smooth areas, find the nicest, smoothest, safest one.
1:39.1	Touchdown. Pick up some rocks and dust.
1:41.6	And collect a sample.
1:42.9	Seal it up. Bring it back to Earth.
1:44.7	Bing, bang, boom.
1:45.5	We're done.
1:46.3	Easy peasy, right?
	...

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