The landing caps a six-year joint mission between the agency and the University of Arizona.
LOS ANGELES: A Nasa space capsule carrying the largest soil sample ever scooped up from the surface of an asteroid streaked through Earth’s atmosphere today and parachuted into the Utah desert, delivering the celestial specimen to scientists.
It marked only the third asteroid sample, and by far the biggest, ever returned to Earth for analysis, following two similar missions by Japan’s space agency ending in 2010 and 2020. Apparently made up of a loose collection of rocks, like a rubble pile, Bennu measures just 500m across, making it slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall but tiny compared with the Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.Because its present-day chemistry and mineralogy are virtually unchanged since forming some 4.5 billion years ago, it holds valuable clues to the origins and development of rocky planets such as Earth.
Hitting the upper atmosphere at 35 times the speed of sound about 13 minutes prior to landing, the capsule glowed red hot as it plunged earthward and temperatures inside the vessel were expected to reach 2,800°C.
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