The largest asteroid sample ever collected, and the first by NASA, landed in the US desert of Utah on Sunday after a dizzying descent through Earth’s atmosphere, seven years after the Osiris-Rex probe took off.

The fall, detected by military sensors, was stopped by two parachutes.

The sample, taken in 2020 from the asteroid Bennu, contains about 250 grams of material, according to U.S. space agency estimates, far more than the two previous asteroid samples collected by Japanese missions.

This is the first time that NASA, the American space agency, has managed to return samples from an asteroid to Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) managed to recover asteroid debris in 2020, but it was a minimal amount, no more than a teaspoon of dust and rocks.

As he said EFE According to NASA planetary scientist Lucas Paganini, Bennu contains molecules that date back to the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago and could shed light on questions that have intrigued humanity for centuries, such as the origins of life and the solar system itself. .

“Asteroids are very important because they are the debris from when the planets formed 4.5 billion years ago. They are like time capsules, similar to dinosaur fossils, allowing us to know what happened millions of years ago. In this case, our mission takes us back billions of years,” Paganini explains.

It is the “largest sample we have recovered from lunar rocks” from the Apollo program, which ended in 1972, he told the AFP NASA scientist Amy Simon before landing.

About four hours before the scheduled landing time, the Osiris-Rex probe released the capsule containing the sample, more than 100,000 kilometers from Earth.

During the last 13 minutes, this capsule passed through the atmosphere: it entered at a speed of more than 44,000 km/h and reached a temperature of 2,700°C. The probe continued its mission to another asteroid.

Once the capsule reached the ground, a team equipped with gloves and masks checked its condition before placing it in a net and lifting it to a helicopter.

The capsule should be exposed to the desert sand for as short a time as possible to avoid contamination of the sample that could interfere with subsequent analyses.

The sample will be flown to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas on Monday. There the box opens, in another airtight space. The process will take days.

NASA plans a press conference on October 11 to announce the first results.

Most of the sample will be preserved for the study of future generations. About 25% will be used immediately for experiments and a small portion will be shared with partners Japan and Canada.

Bennu was discovered in 1999 and is thought to have formed after a collision from fragments of a much larger asteroid. It is half a kilometer wide, about the height of the Empire State Building, and its rough, black surface is strewn with large rocks.

In addition, there is a hypothesis that Bennu will collide with Earth in 159 years and although this possibility is only 0.057%, this NASA mission would also serve to see how the asteroid’s orbit could be changed if necessary, Paganini told EFE . “Welcome home!” (JO)