Special Delivery from Outer Space

NASA's Curious Universe

Katie Konans

Science

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On September 24, 2023, a capsule from space parachuted down into the Utah desert. Tucked inside it were 4.5-billion-year-old bits of rock and dust from a faraway asteroid named Bennu collected by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. These pristine space rocks, which contain carbon and other building blocks of life, could rewrite scientists’ understanding of our solar system. In this episode, sit in mission control and ride aboard helicopters with asteroid mission leaders like Dante Lauretta and Mike Moreau for a behind-the-scenes look at the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission’s epic conclusion. NASA's Curious Universe is an official NASA podcast. Discover more adventures with NASA astronauts, engineers, scientists, and other experts at nasa.gov/curiousuniverse

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dry bag. I got personal bags so far.
0:05.0	There it is. Dry bag check.
0:09.0	It was a cold morning in the Utah desert, long before sunrise, on September 24th.
0:14.0	Now sampler's last, right? So I'm actually a spare should be at the bottom.
0:19.0	You keep going. Inside a military building, buzzing with NASA engineers and scientists,
0:23.6	Dante Loretta ran through his checklist one last time,
0:26.6	prepping his backpack with field gear.
0:29.6	Do you have the filters?
0:31.6	Two filters, two containers, check.
0:33.6	He'd been up since 1 a.m.
0:35.6	He couldn't sleep, thinking of his spacecraft,
0:38.9	the one he'd worked on for nearly two decades,
0:41.8	hurtling towards Earth high above his head.
0:44.4	This one?
0:45.8	Here, check.
0:48.5	This day, the day of the return, had been set for years.
0:53.6	The end of the nearly had been set for years,
0:56.9	the end of the nearly four billion mile journey for Osiris Rex.
0:58.9	I'm just trying to do as much now as I can.
1:00.8	Yep, make sense.
1:03.3	After a nerve-wracking night,
1:05.3	it had just successfully released its payload,
	...

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