Psyche launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2023 with the objective of visiting the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, which is believed to be the exposed core of a demolished planetesimal, or tiny planet.

This past July, as part of periodic testing and calibration of Psyche's science instruments during its cruise phase, the probe's team had it look back at Earth, which was then around 180 million miles (290 kilometers) away.

The result of long-exposure shots taken on July 20 and July 23 is a thought-provoking image of Earth and the moon amid a stellar backdrop, providing a rare perspective of the Earth's place in space. The brightness of Earth and moon comes from reflected sunlight, set among stars belonging to the constellation Aries.

The image demonstrates the performance of the spacecraft's twin cameras. Its multispectral imager is designed to detect different wavelengths of light, as the spectral signatures from light that reflects off 16 Psyche can be used to learn about the asteroid's composition. For last month's imaging test, Earth and the moon, shining with reflected sunlight, provided a useful target, but the team may choose more distant objects in the future.

"After this, we may look at Saturn or [the huge asteroid] Vesta to help us continue to test the imagers," Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University in Tempe, said in a statement. The imager has previously also been trained on Jupiter and Mars.

"We're sort of collecting solar system 'trading cards' from these different bodies and running them through our calibration pipeline to make sure we're getting the right answers," Bell said.

Psyche is currently on its way to Mars, and will use the Red Planet for a gravitational slingshot maneuver in spring 2026 to send it toward 16 Psyche. If all goes well, the probe will arrive at the metallic asteroid in 2029.

The 1,100-foot-wide (340 meters) Apophis, also known as asteroid 99942, is set to make a very close, but safe, flyby of Earth on April 13, 2029. The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing its Ramses (Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety) mission for a 2028 launch in order to accompany the rocky body during its close approach.

Ramses aims to conduct a before-and-after-flyby analysis of the asteroid and features such as its surface characteristics, composition, orbit and more. Apophis' gravitational interaction with Earth is expected to trigger tidal forces in the asteroid, potentially altering its surface and interior. Understanding how Apophis is affected will bring valuable insights for international planetary defense efforts.

And now, ESA plans to add a second cubesat to the mission, to attempt a landing on Apophis. It has selected the Spanish company Emxys to lead the development of what is a demanding task.

"Landing on an asteroid is very challenging," Paolo Martino, Ramses project manager, said in an ESA statement. "The irregular shape and surface properties make it difficult to identify a stable landing site, while the very weak gravity makes it hard to stay on the surface without bouncing off and drifting away."

The main Ramses spacecraft will be a modified version of ESA's Hera probe, which is on its way to the binary asteroid system Didymos to assess the effects of NASA's 2022 DART (Double Asteroid Redirect Test) impact.

Ramses' status is not secure, however, despite apparent momentum behind the mission, as it requires ESA member states to officially commit to financially backing the mission at the agency's Ministerial Council meeting in November this year.

Another agency looking at launching a dedicated mission to track and study Apophis is NASA. Scientists at the Apophis T-4 Years Workshop held in Tokyo in April urged NASA to repurpose the shelved Janus spacecraft to make a pre-Earth-encounter investigation of Apophis.

The agency, however, currently lacks the budget to carry out such a mission, according to reports.

A May 19 SpaceNews story reported that Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, said that the agency is looking into possibilities for using Janus for an Apophis mission, but stated that these depend on budgets for fiscal year 2026 and beyond. The context for this is not favorable, however. The Trump administration's 2026 budget request, issued earlier this month, calls for very deep cuts to the NASA budget, hitting science particularly hard.

A study into collaborating with non-traditional partners for the mission, meanwhile, was found to be not viable, also due to funding issues, SpaceNews reported.

NASA will have at least one spacecraft visiting Apophis, however. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which collected samples from the asteroid Bennu and delivered them to Earth, is on an extended mission — named OSIRIS-APEX — and will arrive at Apophis roughly one month after the asteroid's Earth flyby.

Another visit will be made to Apophis due to a delay to the launch of a Japanese mission. DESTINY+ was scheduled to launch this year to study the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, the parent of the Geminid meteor shower. However, issues with the development of Japan's Epsilon S rocket have seen a change of plans, pushing back launch to 2028, but also affording the opportunity to make a flyby of Apophis on its way.

Scientists are calling for thorough Aphophis investigations beyond a mere flyby. "We recognize that the entire world will be watching how we collectively respond to the knowledge opportunity for planetary defense presented by the safe but very close Earth passage by the asteroid Apophis in April 2029," an Apophis T-4 workshop summary communique stated.

It backed OSIRIS-APEX, DESTINY+ and Ramses, calling these the highest-priority missions for Apophis, which should be "fully funded and supported to ensure successful achievement of their science objectives."

"We find that international collaborations and coordination are imperative for achieving Apophis 2029 science," the communique read, adding that time is of the essence for moving forward and funding missions.

The complication surrounds a "decrease in fuel pressure" within Psyche's solar electric propulsion setup, NASA says, which led the team to power off the thrusters until a solution arises. However, the agency also affirms that these thrusters can remain off until at least mid-June before worries arise about Psyche's trajectory toward its asteroid target. "The mission team has chosen to defer thrusting while engineers work to understand the pressure decrease," NASA said in a statement. "The electric propulsion system has two identical fuel lines, and the team may decide to switch to the backup fuel line to resume thrusting."

Like the probe itself, Psyche's propulsion system is blazing new trails. This is the first time, the mission team says, that this specific mechanism of zipping through space has been used on a probe beyond lunar orbit.

In essence, sunlight collected with Psyche's large solar arrays gets converted into electricity, which then powers up the spacecraft's four thrusters. Once powered up with enough sunlight-derived energy, the thrusters — called "Hall thrusters" — use electromagnetic fields to expel charged atoms of xenon gas that are stored in tanks aboard the spacecraft.

In addition to giving Psyche's thrusters a pretty cool neon blue glow, this xenon expulsion creates a gentle thrust to move the spacecraft — gentle enough to exert "the same amount of pressure you’d feel holding three quarters in your hand," NASA has said. However, the point is for that subtle thrust to build up momentum over time, which is especially easy to do in the vacuum of space. All the while, barely any fuel will be used, meaning Psyche is highly efficient and light.

"With no atmospheric drag to hold it back, the spacecraft eventually will accelerate to speeds of up to 124,000 miles per hour (200,000 kilometers per hour) relative to Earth," NASA explains.

By contrast, NASA says traditional chemical propulsion would have required Psyche to be packed with 15 times more fuel before it was launched to space on Oct. 13, 2023.

In terms of the issue that Psyche is currently experiencing, it has to do with the way the xenon gas is being fed into the thrusters for expulsion.

"On April 1, the spacecraft detected a pressure drop in the line that feeds the xenon gas to the thrusters, going from 36 pounds per square inch (psi) to about 26 psi," NASA said in the recent statement about the glitch.

We'll likely know more about whether the backup line will be used, or if the original line improves its condition, in the coming weeks. Hopefully, Psyche bounces back to full health so it can investigate the many mysteries of 16 Psyche. One of the biggest is whether the asteroid truly is filled with extremely valuable metals (metals we can mine?), is a bare planetary core, or is just a sneaky pile of random rubble.

The next major milestone for the mission's route falls in the spring of 2026, when Psyche will fly by Mars and use the Red Planet's gravitational tides to catapult itself toward the main asteroid belt. If all goes to plan, we'll get a peek at 16 Psyche in 2029.

To do this, they built a network of all-sky cameras across the globe, which they named the Global Fireball Observatory.

"This has been a decade-long detective story, with each recorded meteorite fall providing a new clue," one of the project’s founders, Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center, said in a statement. "We now have the first outlines of a geologic map of the asteroid belt."

Jennisken’s colleague, Hadrien Devillepoix of Curtin University, added: "Others built similar networks spread around the globe, which together form the Global Fireball Observatory. Over the years, we have tracked the path of 17 recovered meteorite falls."

The team's research was published on Monday (March 17) in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

From the main asteroid belt to Earth's atmosphere

Meteorites are rocks from space that survive their fiery descent through Earth's atmosphere and reach the ground. More than just dazzling streaks of light as meteors, these ancient fragments are among the oldest materials in our solar system, originating from planets, asteroids, and comets.

Most meteorites, however, originate from the solar system's main asteroid belt—a vast region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where more than a million asteroids circle the sun. Its formation remains a subject of debate, but astronomers believe it dates back around 4.5 billion years to the formation of the solar system's planets. These asteroids are thought to consist of leftover planetesimals, the building blocks of planets that never fully coalesced into a larger body.

The asteroid belt contains debris fields known as clusters, which form when larger asteroids break apart due to random collisions. These smaller fragments remain grouped together and are called asteroid families.

By measuring the radioactive elements present in a meteorite, astronomers can determine their age and match it to the "dynamical age" of asteroid debris fields. The dynamical age is the amount of time that has passed since an asteroid or group of asteroids was disrupted or scattered, determined by studying how the objects have spread out over time due to their movements and interactions, like gravitational forces or collisions.

The more spread out the asteroids are, the older the debris field is likely to be. Essentially, it gives an estimate of how long it has been since the original disruption that caused the objects to scatter.

By analyzing data gathered from watching the night sky and by using a combination of video footage and photographic observations of meteors, Devillepoix, Jenniskens, and their teams have tracked the origins of 75 meteorites in the asteroid belt.

"Six years ago, there were just hints that different meteorite types arrived on different orbits, but now, the number of orbits (N) is high enough for distinct patterns to emerge," they wrote in their paper.

One particularly interesting finding centers around iron-rich ordinary chondrite meteorites or "H chondrites," one of the most common types of meteorites that land on Earth. Their chemistry is considered primitive because they have never undergone melting and have experienced very few chemical interactions since their formation—making them valuable time capsules for understanding the early solar system.

"We now see that 12 of the iron-rich ordinary chondrite meteorites (H chondrites) originated from a debris field called 'Koronis,' which is located low in the pristine main belt," said Jenniskens. "These meteorites arrived from low-inclined orbits with orbital periods consistent with this debris field.

"By measuring the cosmic ray exposure age of meteorites, we can determine that three of these twelve meteorites originated from the Karin cluster in Koronis, which has a dynamical age of 5.8 million years, and two came from the Koronis2 cluster, with a dynamical age of 10-15 million years," he continued. “One other meteorite may well measure the age of the Koronis3 cluster: about 83 million years.”

The team also discovered that several groups of meteorites, including H-chondrites, originated from different regions in the asteroid belt. Some H-chondrites, with an age of about 6 million years, come from the Nele asteroid family, while others, with an exposure age of 35 million years, come from the inner main belt, likely from the Massalia asteroid family.

They also found that the second most common group of meteorites, stony L chondrites, and the least abundant stony meteorites, LL chondrites, which are primarily from the inner main belt, trace back to the Flora and Hertha asteroid families. The L chondrites, in particular, experienced a violent origin 468 million years ago and are linked to a massive collision.

While this provides one of the most comprehensive maps of the asteroid belt to date, not all meteorites in the database were assigned, and some assignments still carried uncertainty.

But for Devillepoix and Jenniskens, this is just the beginning.

"We are proud about how far we have come, but there is a long way to go," said Jenniskens. "Like the first cartographers who traced the outline of Australia, our map reveals a continent of discoveries still ahead when more meteorite falls are recorded.

Currently 45 million miles (70 million kilometers) from the two-mile-wide (3.2-kilometer-wide) Donaldjohanson, Lucy's high-resolution camera L'LORRI (Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) spotted the asteroid moving against a background of stars. Lucy will continue to track Donaldjohanson, adjusting its trajectory to ensure an accurate flyby on April 20, when the spacecraft will come within 596 miles (960 kilometers) of the asteroid, which orbits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The encounter with Donaldjohanson won't be Lucy's first visit to an asteroid. Having launched on Oct. 16, 2021, Lucy encountered the asteroid Dinkinesh and its moon, Selam, in November of 2023. Like Donaldjohanson, Dinkinesh and Selam are also inhabitants of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Selam in particular was very interesting because it turned out to be a contact binary — two separate objects touching each other and held together by their mutual gravity. Selam's origin is still a puzzle, but scientists think it might be made from material flung off Dinkinesh as Dinkinesh's rotation was spun up by solar heating, exerting a torque over the course of millions of years.

Although relatively few minor planets have been explored by spacecraft, a high fraction of them have proved to be anything but boring, some having accompanying moons, others adopting unusual shapes and some spraying jets of debris.

For now, however, Donaldjohanson appears only as a point of light to Lucy, and the spacecraft won't be able to detect any details about its structure until the day of the close encounter, when Donaldjohanson will appear large enough in Lucy's sky to begin to resolve its features.

Who knows what Lucy will find?

Then, after the Donaldjohanson fly-by, Lucy will still have a packed schedule ahead of it. In August of 2027, Lucy will have its first encounter with one of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. The Trojans are two huge swarms of asteroids that have settled into the Lagrange L4 and L5 points, 60 degrees ahead and 60 degrees behind Jupiter in its orbit around the sun. The Trojan asteroids are all named after heroes of the Trojan War in Greek mythology — the first Trojan that Lucy will meet is the 620-mile-wide (1,000-kilometer-wide) 3548 Eurybates, in the "Greek camp" located at L4. After visiting three more Trojan asteroids in the Greek camp, Lucy will actually head back to Earth in 2030 to receive a gravitational slingshot towards the "Trojan camp" at Jupiter's L5 point in 2033.

And, if you’re wondering, Donaldjohanson has a direct link to the Lucy spacecraft's name. Donald Johanson is a paleoanthropologist who discovered parts of a fossilized skeleton of an ancestor of homo sapiens', an australopithecine that lived 3.2 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. That skeleton was named "Lucy." The spacecraft named after that ancient hominid is also exploring fossils, in the sense that asteroids are leftovers from the dawn of the solar system and can tell us much about Earth's origin, just as Lucy the fossil can tell us about human evolution.

NEOWISE closed its eyes for good this past summer and fell back to Earth on Nov. 1. During its long and productive life, the probe spent nearly 15 years in space, conducting 21 infrared surveys of the entire night sky and capturing all manner of cosmic phenomena.

For most of its operational life, the telescope focused on identifying and observing small objects in our solar system, such as asteroids, comets, and other near-Earth objects (NEOs). Thanks to NEOWISE observing the same parts of the night sky at different intervals, researchers have been able to track the movements and behavior of a number of nearby celestial objects.

The final NEOWISE data release was made available to the astronomy community on Nov. 14. To help celebrate that milestone and the mission's success overall, NEOWISE team members have unveiled six new images dug out of the telescope's archives.

Related: NASA's 15-year-old NEOWISE asteroid hunter meets fiery doom by burning up in Earth's atmosphere

"Being able to watch the changing sky for nearly 15 years has opened a new avenue for time-domain science, for everything from the closest asteroids to the most distant quasars," NEOWISE Deputy Principal Investigator Joe Masiero, a research scientist at IPAC, said in a Nov. 26 press release.

IPAC, which is on the campus of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, originally stood for "Infrared Processing & Analysis Center." But the facility "has since grown beyond its inaugural name — and is now known simply as 'IPAC' — by building upon its experience in infrared data processing and analysis to provide a range of support for more than 20 missions and projects with observatories both in space and on the ground," according to the IPAC website.

One of the newly released images captures the California Nebula in all of its glory. The infrared shot shows green and red dust clouds underlying the nebula shimmering against a backdrop of stars.

The California Nebula, which is about 100 light-years wide, sits about 1,000 light-years away from Earth, in the Perseus constellation. It was named after its resemblance to the California coastline, so the newly released image is particularly meaningful to the NEOWISE data-processing team at IPAC, according to Masiero.

"I'm really grateful for all of the people at IPAC who have put so much effort into making this the best dataset possible, for today and for future generations," he said.

Another featured image depicts the Gecko Nebula, so named because part of the cloud looks like a lizard's snout.

"Near the 'snout' of the gecko you can see a blazing star with a strong red tint, due to its brightness at longer wavelengths of infrared light," IPAC team members wrote in an image description. "This baby star is in its final stages of formation, and while it gobbles up the last of its fuel, some is ejected away in jets of gas that are carving cavities through the surrounding dust clouds."

A third newly released image shows the nebula CG12, which looks like a tadpole. "It is an example of a 'cometary globule,' where a denser region of dust trails off into thread-like strands," the IPAC image description reads. "While challenging to see in visible light images, WISE easily shows the full extent of the globule’s tail as it lights up at longer wavelengths of infrared light."

You can see, and learn more about, all six images in the Nov. 26 IPAC statement. And they represent just a tiny fraction of the gems hidden away in the WISE/NEOWISE archives, mission team members said.

"We know there are more things to discover in the NEOWISE data that we just haven't noticed yet," Masiero said. "As astronomers develop new tools and techniques and as new surveys are conducted, we can be sure the NEOWISE archive will be one of the first places we look for the data needed to better understand our universe."

Analysis of the asteroid 2024 PT5, which will leave Earth on Monday (Nov. 25), conducted during its stay around our planet, shows it may have been born from material ejected from our true moon after one of the old collisions that left the lunar surface pitted and scarred with craters. 

The leading theory of moon formation, the aptly named "giant impact hypothesis," suggests that Earth's loyal lunar companion was born when a titanic collision around 4 billion years ago sprayed out molten material from Earth that eventually cooled and condensed. This means Earth is likely the grandparent of this "second moon," or "mini-moon."

"There are multiple lines of evidence suggesting that this asteroid may have a lunar origin," Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, discovery lead author and a professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, told Space.com. "Current research favors its rapid rotation with a rotational period under one hour, to be expected if 2024 PT5 is either a large boulder from the surface of the moon or a fragment from a larger object."

The mini-moon's lunar origin is further hinted at by its spectra, which suggest its chemical composition matches well with lunar material brought to Earth by the Russian Luna missions and NASA's Apollo moon missions.

How Earth captured a mini-moon

The "mini-moon" asteroid originates from the Arjuna asteroid belt, a secondary asteroid belt made of space rocks that follow an orbit around the sun that's very similar to Earth's orbit, dwelling at an average distance of about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) to the sun.

"Some Arjuna asteroid belt objects can approach Earth at a close range of around 2.8 million miles (4.5 million kilometers) and at a relatively low velocity of less than 2,200 miles per hour (3,540 km per hour)," Marcos explained. "Asteroid 2024 PT5 will not describe a full orbit around Earth. You may say that if a true satellite is like a customer buying goods inside a store, objects like 2024 PT5 are window shoppers."

Mini-moon events are divided into two categories: those with long episode stays, during which the asteroid completes one or more full orbits of our planet over the course of one or more years, and short engagements in which the small body does not complete one full revolution. These later, more temporary captures last just days, weeks, or even a few months.

Marcos said that, to become a mini-moon, an incoming asteroid has to approach Earth within a range of around 2.8 million miles (4.5 million km) and at about 2,200 mph (3,540 km per hour), a relatively slow speed.

These conditions were met by 2024 PT5 at 3:54 EDT (1954 UTC) on Sept. 29, 2024, marking the beginning of its short capture. The occupation will end at 11:43 EDT (1543 UTC) on (Nov. 25), when perturbations caused by the sun's gravity will disrupt its orbit. 

When it leaves Earth, the asteroid will return to its adoptive family of the Arjuna asteroid belt.

Marcos added that, thanks to the extensive astrometry obtained from the Teide Observatory, the determination of the orbit of 2024 PT5 has been greatly improved. That means it is now well known enough for NASA to study this object using radar  when it makes another close approach to Earth on Jan. 9, 2025.

But that isn't all scientists have learned about this mini-moon so far. As discussed, several papers have suggest that, before its adoption by the Arjuna asteroid belt, 2024 PT5 was a child of the moon, created when an asteroid struck the moon and caused material to be ejected. These findings could also suggest that other bodies in the Arjuna asteroid belt owe their origins to the moon.

"In the lunar ejecta formation scenario, 2024 PT5 could be a large boulder from the surface of the moon that was ejected into cislunar space after a cratering event, subsequently evolving dynamically towards an orbit within the Arjuna asteroid belt," Marcos said. "This object has helped the community to realize that lunar ejecta is probably a main source for the material that constitutes the Arjuna asteroid belt."

"I won't really be sad to see 2024 PT5 go; mini-moons come and go as they wish. I am just waiting for the next one," Marcos concluded. "That wait will not be long; the next capture will probably happen within the next few months. The ongoing Near Earth Object surveys are now sensitive enough to pick up these objects on a regular basis."

Marcos is one of the authors of a new paper on 2024 PT5 and its characteristics accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available on the preprint repository arXiv. 

The Hera spacecraft, speeding on to an asteroid, took a look back at Earth's moon — and in a new animation, you can see our neighbor shrinking as Hera flies away.

Hera's images of the Earth (visible as a small dot) and the moon were taken between Oct. 10 and 15, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), which runs the mission.

Related: Earth sure looks spooky in these 'hyperspectral' images from Europe's Hera asteroid probe

"The images were acquired during the initial checkout of Hera’s Thermal Infrared Imager (TIRI) instrument, provided to the mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency," ESA officials added in a statement released Tuesday (Nov. 5).

The Hera spacecraft launched Oct. 7 to study a binary asteroid system up close. By 2026, it should arrive at the crash site of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Mission, or DART.

The NASA spacecraft slammed into an asteroid moonlet, called Dimorphos, in 2022. The orbit of Dimorphos around the larger asteroid in the system, Didymos, was permanently altered after the collision.

DART's goal was to examine how well a planetary defense strategy in moving a threatening space rock away from Earth. Hera will examine the collision from a nearby vantage point, providing a different point of view than the telescopes that examined DART's aftermath before.

Additionally, Hera will examine the mineral composition of Dimorphos to provide more information about the asteroid's origins.

The NEOWISE spacecraft from NASA, which surveyed 3,000 near-Earth objects such as asteroids in its lifetime, burned up in the atmosphere as expected on Friday (Nov. 1), the agency announced.

NASA confirmed the spacecraft's demise on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday (Nov. 2). While it's the end for NEOWISE, NASA continues to look for stray asteroids with a network of partner telescopes on Earth. A successor asteroid hunter may also launch soon.

NEOWISE was originally launched as WISE (the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) in December 2009, aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket.

Related: After 14 years in space, NASA's prolific NEOWISE asteroid-hunter is about to shut down

WISE's job was to scrutinize the universe in infrared (or thermal) wavelengths, and it did that for more than a year. It found "the most luminous galaxies in the cosmos, finding millions of hidden black holes, and discovering the coolest class of star," NASA officials wrote in a mission summary.

The spacecraft needed coolant to function properly, and when that depleted as expected, engineers put the spacecraft in hibernation in February 2011. With funding came a "second act," as NASA termed it, of the mission: now called NEOWISE, or Near-Earth Objects Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, it began looking for bodies much closer to our planet instead.

The repurposed mission was due in large part to luck, then-NEOWISE principal investigator Amy Mainzer, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, noted in 2019: "It turned out to be pretty good at picking up asteroids," she said during a media briefing at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

The spacecraft proved adept at its new task, concluding its mission after having "surpassed all expectations and provided vast amounts of data that the science community will use for decades to come," Joseph Hunt, NEOWISE's last project manager at JPL, said when the mission's end was announced in June.

NEOWISE's demise was due to the solar maximum, or the height of the sun's 11-year cycle of activity. At solar maximum, there are more frequent and powerful solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which heat up and expand Earth's atmosphere. NEOWISE had no propulsion system on board and, being in low Earth orbit, had no way of boosting itself, so it was slowly dragged down to its death.

The successor mission, NASA's NEO Surveyor (Near Earth Object Surveyor), will be the first space telescope that will be specifically designed to hunt near-Earth objects in infrared wavelengths. It is expected to launch in late 2027 for planetary defense, according to a statement issued by NASA earlier this year.

ESA signed a contract worth €63 million (about $68 million US at current exchange rates) with OHB Italia at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here on Thursday (Oct. 17), allowing teams to proceed with phase 1 of mission development. 

The Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety mission, or Ramses for short, faces a race against time. It needs to launch in early 2028 in order to get up close with the infamous asteroid Apophis as it passes Earth on April 13, 2029. The planetary defense mission would study Apophis' composition, structure and how the tidal forces of Earth affect the asteroid and its cohesion.

The mission is not completely approved and funded: ESA member states will need to dish up the full requirement of money for Ramses at the agency's next crucial Ministerial Council meeting in 2025. But Thursday's signing means that the mission can hit the ground running in case of a potential positive decision, by already getting to work on time-critical activities, including finalizing the overall design.

Related: Apophis: The infamous asteroid we thought might hit us

Ramses has the recently launched Hera mission to thank for its chance to race to meet Apophis. The spacecraft will be an adapted version of Hera, carrying a suite of instruments. And the phase 1 development is being paid for by money saved by Hera being completed under budget. 

"To be there on time is very challenging. We could not wait for the Ministerial; therefore, with exceptional circumstances, we asked our member states to make use of available resources," said Paolo Martino, ESA Ramses project manager.

The mission, however, presents an opportunity to study a unique and timely event, as the 1,230-foot-wide (375 meters) Apophis is due to make an exceptionally close pass to Earth in 2029. The asteroid will move inside geostationary orbit and be visible to the naked eye.

"This is not only a fascinating mission for us; it's also a major milestone of our planet and defense activities," said Holger Krag, ESA's Space Safety Program head. "Our goal in the space safety program is to provide warnings of three weeks' time to notice for all objects of 30-meter [100 feet] size and larger, and to deflect asteroids up to 500-meter [1,650 feet] size, and Apophis is exactly in this size."

Roberto Aceti, managing director at OHB Italia, says the mission will require a different approach, emphasizing the need for fast and efficient project management to meet the tight timeline.

"There will be a different way to deal with mission risks, because, at the end of the day, the ability to steer the mission development is directly connected to the way you manage risks. And the risk here is delays. If we miss by one week, the asteroid is gone," Aceti said.

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and others praised the rapid decision-making and support from member states, which allowed the pragmatic actions and the potential fast development of the Ramses mission.

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti also voiced support for the mission. "Ramses is an incredible step in progressing in our ability as humanity to take care of ourselves and protect our homeworld," Cristoforetti said.

Ramses won't be the only mission potentially visiting Apophis. NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which collected samples from the asteroid Bennu and delivered them to Earth, is on an extended mission — named OSIRIS-APEX — and will arrive at Apophis roughly one month after the asteroid's Earth flyby.

OSIRIS-REx and Ramses, like Hera and NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), could be another example of space agencies coming together to develop planetary defense capabilities. 

The main Hera spacecraft and its two partner cubesats, named Milani and Juventas, are set to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Oct. 7 at 10:52 a.m. EDT (1452 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They'll arrive at Dimorphos in late 2026, on a mission to study the aftermath of NASA's planetary defense test, which intentionally smashed a spacecraft into the asteroid in September 2022, shortening its orbit by 33 minutes and permanently altering its shape.

"We're very excited to go back and see what it looks like," Patrick Michel, Hera's principal investigator, said at the Europlanet Science Congress on Friday (Sept. 13) in Berlin.

Hera will assess the size and depth of the crater on Dimorphos created by NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft, and determine whether the impact did indeed reshape the rubble-pile asteroid, as early simulations indicate. Once deployed, the two cubesats will for the first time assess Dimorphos' internal structure, surface minerals as well as gravity, data that will help scientists correctly reproduce the asteroid's final structure in their computer models, Michel said at the conference. Such models will then inform future planetary defense missions that similarly aim to deflect asteroids headed toward Earth.

Related: DART's epic asteroid crash: What NASA has learned

Hera and its two cubesats arrived at their launch site in Florida in early September following a transatlantic flight from Germany, with a stop in Ireland. The mission's launch window opens on Oct. 7 and closes on Oct. 27, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

Hera has a date with Mars in March next year; it will receive a gravity boost from the Red Planet to put it on course toward Dimorphos. During the maneuver, Hera will swing past the Mars moon Deimos and test onboard science instruments and its main camera. 

"It gives us another chance to calibrate our instruments and potentially to make some scientific discoveries," Michael Kuppers, who is Hera's project scientist at ESA, said of the Mars flyby in a previous statement.

If all goes to plan, the spacecraft will arrive at Dimorphos in late 2026 and inch closer to the asteroid's surface through repeated flybys until it ends up less than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) away, Kuppers said at the conference. 

The mission is expected to gather at least six months of close-up observations of the asteroid, which at 525 feet (160 meters) wide is about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Dimorphos' surface will be more visible at that point than it was in the immediate aftermath of the DART collision; the rocks and dust blasted into space by the smashup have since floated away, likely on their way to spark meteor showers on Mars and possibly Earth.

Hera's images of Dimorphos will also help determine whether DART's crash indeed knocked the asteroid out of alignment such that it now wobbles back and forth, as scientists have suggested.

"Dimorphos might also be 'tumbling,' meaning that we may have caused it to rotate chaotically and unpredictably," Derek Richardson, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland and a DART investigation working group lead, said last month in a university statement. "One of our biggest questions now is if Dimorphos is stable enough for spacecraft to land and install more research equipment on it."

That answer might arrive at the end of Hera's mission, when its two cubesats Milani and Juventas will attempt to land on Dimorphos. Hera itself might land on Didymos, Dimorphos' larger companion — both spacecraft orbit a common center of mass — although the specifics of end-of-mission scenarios are still under discussion, Kuppers said on Friday.

Martin D. Suttle is a Lecturer in Planetary Science at The Open University.

What's the difference between an asteroid and a comet? A comet is basically a dirty iceball composed of rock and ice. The classic image is of a bright "star" in the night sky with a long curved tail extending into space. This is what happens when they approach the sun and start emitting gases and releasing dust. It normally continues until there's nothing left but rock or until they fragment into dust.

Asteroids, on the other hand, are primarily just rocks. They might conjure up notions of Hans Solo steering the Millennium Falcon through an implausibly dense "asteroid field" to escape a swarm of TIE Fighters, but mostly they just quietly orbit the sun, minding their own business.

Yet these two space objects are not always as mutually exclusive as this would suggest. Let me introduce Phaethon, a "rock comet" that blurs the definitions between asteroid and comet, and let me tell you why it will be worth paying attention to this fascinating object in the coming years.

Phaethon was discovered by chance in 1983 by two astronomers at the University of Leicester, Simon Green and John Davies. They came across it orbiting the Sun while analyzing images collected by a space telescope called the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (Iras). Soon after, other astronomers recognized that Phaethon is the source of the annual Geminid meteor shower – one of the brightest meteor displays in Earth's calendar.

Every December, as our planet crosses the dusty trail left behind by Phaethon, we are treated to a brilliant spectacle as its dust grains burn up in our atmosphere. Yet Phaetho'’s behavior is unlike that of any other objects responsible for a meteor shower. 

Unlike typical comets that shed substantial amounts of dust when they heat up near the sun, Phaethon doesn’t seem to be releasing enough dust today to account for the Geminids. This absence of significant dust emissions generates an interesting problem.

Phaethon’s orbit brings it extremely close to the sun, much closer than Mercury, our innermost planet. At its closest approach (termed perihelion), its surface temperature reaches extremes of around 730°C.

You would expect such intense heat to strip away any volatile materials that exist on Phaethon's surface. This should either expose fresh, unheated layers and shed huge volumes of dust and gas each time it passes close to the sun, or form a barren crust that protects the volatile-rich interior from further heating, leading to an absence of gas or dust release.

Neither of these processes seem to be occurring, however. Instead, Phaethon continues to exhibit comet-like activity, emitting gas but not an accompanying dust cloud. It’s therefore not shedding layers, so the mystery is why the same crust can still emit volatile gases each time it is heated by the sun.

Our experiment 

I led newly published research aimed at addressing this puzzle by simulating the intense solar heating that Phaethon experiences during its perihelion.

We used chips from a rare group of meteorites called the CM chondrites, which contain clays that are believed to be similar to Phaethon's composition. These were heated in an oxygen-free environment multiple times, simulating the hot-cold/day-night cycles that occur on Phaethon when it is close to the sun.

The results were surprising. Unlike other volatile substances that would typically be lost after a few heating cycles, the small quantities of sulphurous gases contained in the meteorites were released slowly, over many cycles.

This suggests that even after numerous close passes by the Sun, Phaethon still has enough gas to generate comet-like activity during each perihelion.

But how might this work? Our theory is that when Phaethon's surface heats up, iron sulphide minerals held in its subsurface break down into gases, such as sulphur dioxide. However, because the surface layers of Phaethon are relatively impermeable, these gases cannot escape quickly. Instead, they accumulate beneath the surface, for example in pore spaces and cracks.

As Phaethon rotates, which takes just under four hours, day turns to night and the subsurface cools. Some of the trapped gases are able to "back-react" to form a new generation of compounds. When night turns to day again and heating restarts, these decompose and the cycle repeats.

Why this matters

These findings are not just academic but have implications for the Japanese Space Agency (Jaxa)‘s Destiny+ mission, set to launch later this decade. This space probe will fly past Phaethon and study it using two multispectral cameras and a dust analyser. It will hopefully gather particles that will provide further clues about the composition of this enigmatic object.

Either way, our research team’s theory of Phaethon’s gas-emission processes will be crucial for interpreting the data. If we are proven right, it will redefine how scientists think about solar heating as a geological process by making it relevant not only to comets but also to asteroids.

Crucially, Phaethon is not alone. There are about 95 asteroids that pass within 0.20 astronomical units (nearly 19 million miles) of the Sun. Whatever we learn from Phaethon could offer insights into their behaviour and long-term stability, too.

Finally, you may be wondering how all this relates to the Geminid meteor shower. Most likely, Phaethon was emitting dust many years ago. This would have produced the debris band that creates the Geminid shower each time the particles come into contact with Earth’s atmosphere. When we talk about gifts that keep on giving, it’s hard to think of a better example.

The UAE Space Agency-led mission will send a probe to conduct high-speed flybys of six asteroids, completing the spectacular sojourn with a rendezvous and orbiting of a seventh mini-world — and then deploy a small lander onto that final space rock destination.

The UAE and its partners have made significant progress on the bold effort, as outlined below.

Key piece of the puzzle

The Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA) is projected to launch in March 2028, ending its interplanetary tour by arriving at the asteroid 269 Justitia in 2034. That rocky chunk of history may have migrated from a region where giant planets formed — or from even farther out.

Related: UAE's ambitious asteroid mission will tour 7 space rocks

Five of the seven asteroid targets are carbonaceous "C-complex" rocks. That means that EMA can characterize a diverse set of carbonaceous bodies, some potentially rich in phyllosilicates, which form a key piece of the puzzle regarding early solar system formation.

The UAE's enterprising mission builds on the success of the ongoing Emirates Mars Mission, the first interplanetary exploration undertaken by an Arab nation. 

The EMM's Hope orbiter launched back in July 2020, arrived at Mars in February 2021 and continues to monitor the Red Planet's weather from above.

Collaboration 

The UAE Space Agency in Abu Dhabi is leading the upcoming EMA mission in collaboration with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), here at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

This new space trek will span 13 years, with a six-year spacecraft development phase followed by a seven-year voyage to the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. 

"As one of only a few asteroid missions ever planned, and the first multi-asteroid tour and landing mission to the main belt, it's very ambitious, and LASP is very excited to be involved," Pete Withnell, LASP's program manager for the mission, told SPACE.com. 

EMA involves a consortium of academic and hardware development partners within the UAE, Withnell said. The project also includes a number of international "knowledge partners," including LASP, the Italian Space Agency, the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, Leonardo SpA, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

"As the primary knowledge transfer partner, LASP is working in partnership with the UAE Space Agency on all aspects of the mission," Withnell said. This includes mission design, spacecraft development, system testing and engineering and science team development and apprenticeship. LASP also supports the UAE Space Academy program, he said.

Related: UAE's Hope Mars orbiter: The Arab world's first interplanetary mission

Fully equipped

The EMA probe will be outfitted with four instruments: a visible narrow-angle camera, a mid-wave infrared spectrometer, a thermal infrared spectrometer and a thermal infrared camera.

The spacecraft will use this scientific gear for a variety of tasks, including:

• Determine the geologic history and volatile content of multiple main belt asteroids, and investigate the interior structure of the rendezvous target;
• Determine temperatures and thermophysical properties on multiple asteroids to assess their surface evolution and volatile histories;
• Collect remote-sensing data on a representative suite of asteroids to better characterize their potential for in-situ resource utilization for future deep space exploration.

Here's the selected score card of asteroids that EMA will reconnoiter: 10253 Westerwald, 623 Chimera, 13294 Rockox, 88055 (2000 VA28), 23871 (1998 RC76), 59980 (1999 SG6) and 269 Justitia.

Asteroid resources

Heyam Alblooshi, a design engineer with the UAE Space Agency, spoke at this year's Space Resources Roundtable, which was held at the Colorado School of Mines in June. She was involved in UAE's Mars Hope mission. 

Alblooshi highlighted the EMA mission and its ability to identify and characterize resources, including volatiles, silicates and metals on multiple types of asteroids, as well as determine resource mass estimates and distributions based on the interior structure of an asteroid.

EMA can help prepare the way for future asteroid resource use, demonstrating proximity operation maneuvers to simulate landing and orbital rendezvous, Alblooshi said. She noted that the EMA lander to be deployed at the asteroid Justitia is under development by 971 and Sadeem — two private companies in the UAE. That lander design will be finalized this year.

Flight dynamics

Also engaged in EMA and a veteran of the UAE's Mars Hope mission is Fatema Hameli, a space projects development engineer for the UAE Space Agency. Her work is in navigation systems for the multi-asteroid visiting asteroid adventure.

"I'll tell you, Mars is easy to reach from a flight dynamics perspective. But getting to seven asteroids in the main belt is not easy. It's very challenging," Hameli told Space.com after her talk on Aug. 13 at the 2024 Astrodynamics Specialist Conference. 

That high-tech specialist meeting was hosted by the American Astronautical Society and co-hosted by American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and held in neighboring Broomfield, Colorado. 

As a solar electric propulsion mission, Hameli reported, there are many models and assumptions that go into designing EMA's interplanetary trajectory. Recent work has gone into understanding the sensitivity of the trajectory and the overall mission objectives. 

The still-to-be-built EMA spacecraft has two separate propulsion systems: chemical hydrazine thrusters and solar electric propulsion xenon Hall effect thrusters, Hameli explained. The mission will utilize xenon for its primary propulsion needs due to its high specific impulse, translating to efficient fuel usage for long-duration interplanetary travel, she said.

Selecting the precise arrival date at a rendezvous target with asteroid 269 Justitia is critical for a successful mission and is an important factor in mission design, Hameli pointed out.

"The lander is a huge step as one of our main objectives," said Hameli. UAE Space agency teams are developing the navigation software, she said — all the tools that will allow EMA to spend a couple of months at asteroid Justitia to find a site for the spot landing.

"We keep learning as we go," Hameli said. "For me, this is a childhood dream." 

Apophis, also known as asteroid 99942, is a 1,100-foot (340-meter) asteroid set to fly by Earth in 2029. Named after the Egyptian god of chaos and destruction, the massive space rock was once predicted to have close to a 3% chance of hitting Earth. More recent calculations have downgraded the chances of that potential 2029 collision, but planetary defense scientists are still studying the asteroid closely to determine any future risk of an Earth impact.

NASA has already sent its OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft (formerly called OSIRIS-REx) on a "bonus mission" to study Apophis, and the European Space Agency is developing its own relevant mission known as Ramses. Still, it appears NASA wants more intel on Apophis ahead of the object's 2029 approach. In a notice posted to federal government contracting site SAM.gov, the space agency has requested information on how to develop a non-NASA-led "reconnaissance mission" to Apophis using its shelved Janus spacecraft.

The Janus spacecraft are two asteroid probes originally designed to launch with NASA's Psyche probe that lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Oct. 13, 2023. 

Delays to that mission meant the Janus probes would miss their targets — a pair of near-Earth asteroid binaries — so NASA decided to "stand down further work on the Janus mission," the agency wrote in July 2023. Now, it seems the Janus spacecraft could have second lives — fitting for a mission named after the Roman god of duality who is usually depicted as having two faces.

NASA's Request for Information (RFI) asks industry, academia and other researchers to propose new approaches for using the Janus spacecraft to "demonstrate a rapid-response flyby of Apophis" and further our scientific understanding of the asteroid ahead of its April 2029 near-Earth encounter. 

In particular, NASA wants proposals for how to "demonstrate and test capabilities to fly by and characterize a hazardous NEO," or near-Earth object, using a low-cost, rapid turnaround mission. 

Earlier this year, the director of NASA's planetary science division Lori Glaze said that while the 2029 Apophis approach "presents a unique opportunity," getting a mission together to study the space rock is difficult given NASA's ongoing budgetary issues. "Our budget situation is really, really challenging, and that is a reality that we have to live within." Glaze said, according to SpaceNews. "You can have the will, but without the funding it makes it really challenging," 

NASA's RFI notes that proposals for using the Janus spacecraft to fly by Apophis should include information on how interested parties will approach obtaining funding.

The California company announced Tuesday (Aug. 20) that it aims to launch its third mission in 2025, as a ridealong on Houston company Intuitive Machines' IM-3 moon mission. That launch will send AstroForge's 440-pound (200 kilograms) Vestri probe to dock with a metallic near-Earth asteroid — an unprecedented leap for a commercial spacecraft.

"If successful, this mission will be the first private mission to land on another body outside of our Earth-moon system and will move us closer to realizing our mission of making off-world resources accessible to all humankind," AstroForge wrote in an update Tuesday.

That same update revealed that AstroForge has raised $40 million more from investors, bringing its total funding haul to date to $55 million.

AstroForge was founded in January 2022 and came out of stealth mode four months later. The company plans to extract resources from asteroids, "to unlock a cost-effective and sustainable mining solution that replenishes resources and safeguards our planet's future," as it wrote in Tuesday's update.

AstroForge plans to focus on metals — a different tack than that taken by some previous off-Earth mining startups, which aimed to go after asteroid water. Water can be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel. Mining it in space could therefore potentially help establish "gas stations" for spacecraft, fueling their voyages deep into the final frontier cheaply and efficiently. 

That may still happen, but new players will likely have to emerge to make it so; the high-profile companies that were eyeing asteroid water are no longer actively pursuing it.

AstroForge already has one mission under its belt, sending its toaster-sized Brokkr-1 probe to orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in April 2023. The chief goal was to demonstrate the company's refinery technology in space, but that didn't happen; mission team members were unable to activate Brokkr-1's refinery payload as planned.

AstroForge's second mission, called Odin, is scheduled to launch later this year, as a secondary payload on Intuitive Machines' IM-2 moon mission. Odin will pave the way for Vestri, collecting imagery of the asteroid that Vestri will land on. (AstroForge has not yet announced the identity of the target space rock.)

Odin's road to the pad has been a bit bumpy, however. This past March, the vehicle originally slated to fly on the mission failed vibration testing, which is designed to ensure that a spacecraft can survive the rigors of launch. In April, AstroForge decided to use the planned Vestri vehicle for Odin, which required "accelerated development," as the company wrote in an update last month.

The new Odin vehicle, which weighs about 220 pounds (100 kg), was built completely in-house, whereas the one that failed vibration testing consisted of parts supplied by third parties, apart from its science payload, according to AstroForge. 

That shift wasn't just a one-time thing; Vestri "will be developed completely in-house from the start," AstroForge wrote in Tuesday's update. Vestri's "insights and characterization of our target asteroid's composition will allow us to obtain the quality and quantity of valuable elements located on the asteroid." 

Actual mining activity will presumably follow, on a series of missions to come.

While very small meteoroids are common, larger ones – bigger than a dishwasher – are not.

Meteoroids are difficult objects for aerospace and geophysics researchers like us to study, because we can’t usually predict when and where they will hit the atmosphere. But on very rare occasions, we can study artificial objects that enter the atmosphere much like a meteoroid would. 

These objects come from space missions designed to transport physical extraterrestrial samples from outer space to Earth. Because of this similarity to meteoroids in entry, we often refer to these sample return capsules, or SRCs, as “artificial meteors.”

Over 80 researchers from more than a dozen institutions recently worked together to study such an “artificial meteor” – NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule – as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

Related: 1st look at asteroid Bennu samples suggests space rock may even be 'a fragment of an ancient ocean world'

These institutions included Sandia National Laboratories, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, TDA Research Inc., the University of Hawaii, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Atomic Weapons Establishment Blacknest, Boise State University, Idaho National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, Kochi University of Technology, Nevada National Security Site, Southern Methodist University, the University of Memphis and Oklahoma State University.

This sample return provided our teams with a unique opportunity to measure the sound waves and other phenomena that objects from space produce as they speed through the Earth’s atmosphere.

To capture signals, we installed many sensitive microphones and other instruments in key locations close to the SRC’s flight path.

While space agencies and private companies launch objects into space all the time, the OSIRIS-REx SRC is one of only a handful of objects to return to Earth from interplanetary space since the end of the Apollo missions. Only these objects can achieve the speed of natural meteoroids, making their reentry valuable for studying the properties of natural objects. 

Sampling an asteroid 

NASA launched the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, mission on Sept. 8, 2016. It traveled to Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid, and collected a sample from its surface in October of 2020. 

The sample returned to Earth in the early morning of Sept. 24, 2023, in a sample return capsule. The SRC reentered Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at a speed of over 27,000 mph (43,500 kph) and landed in Utah only a few minutes later. 

SRCs produce a shock wave as they plunge deep into the atmosphere, akin to the sonic boom generated by a supersonic jet breaking the sound barrier. The shock wave then loses strength until all that remains is low frequency sound, called infrasound.

While humans can’t hear infrasound, sensitive scientific instruments can detect it, even at great distances. Some of these instruments sit on the ground, while others are suspended in the air from balloons.

Observing the SRC 

Our teams of scientists jumped on the SRC reentry as an opportunity to learn more about meteors. One of the teams, led by Siddharth Krishnamoorthy at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, used the SRC reentry to test infrasound-detecting balloons that could later be used on the planet Venus.

Another team, led by one of us – Elizabeth Silber – and Danny Bowman at Sandia National Labs used the SRC to better understand how we can use sound to [gather information about meteoroids].

Researchers from many institutions across the country participated in these observational campaigns.

Our teams strategically positioned instruments in locations across a 300-mile (482 km) distance spanning from Eureka, Nevada, to close to the landing site in Utah. The instruments ranged from high-tech custom sensors to smartphones on the ground around the SRC’s flight path and landing site. They monitored the low frequency sound waves from the SRC’s reentry.

In addition to the ground-based sensors, our researchers attached instruments to balloons that floated at twice the altitude of commercial planes during the SRC reentry. The sensors attached to these balloons recorded the sound waves produced by the SRC’s shock wave. These sound waves carried information about the SRC, its movement and the environment it passed through.

The balloon teams had to time the balloons carefully to make sure they would be at the right position when the SRC passed. Team members from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Oklahoma State University and Sandia National Laboratories launched a few different kinds of balloons before dawn from Eureka, Nevada.

Researchers from OSU, Sandia and the University of Hawaii also deployed ground infrasound sensors closer to the SRC’s landing location, along the Utah-Nevada border and at Wendover Airport. While the SRC was already slowing down and Wendover Airport was about three times farther from the flight path than the Eureka deployment, we detected a clear infrasound signal at this site as well.

Researchers on these teams are now analyzing the data to identify the points along the trajectory where instruments recorded the SRC reentry signals. Because the SRC’s flight path spanned approximately 300 miles (482 km), the researchers need to figure out the origin points of the signals as the different sensors detected them.

This was the most-instrumented hypersonic reentry in history.

This research will help our teams figure out what patterns the low-frequency sound waves propagated through the atmosphere and where the shock wave was at its peak intensity.

While our teams are still analyzing the data, the preliminary results show our instruments captured lots of signals that will help future research use low-frequency sound waves to study meteors.

And gaining insights into intricacies about how low-frequency sound waves travel through the atmosphere can help researchers use infrasound to detect hazards on Earth, such as tornadoes and avalanches.

Related: OSIRIS-REx: A complete guide to NASA's asteroid-sampling mission

The 0.005-ounce (0.15 grams) pebble represents just 0.1% of the total material that OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) collected from asteroid Bennu in October 2020 and returned to Earth in September 2023. Held within a small stainless steel bottle in a pure-nitrogen environment, the black rock with white speckles is displayed under a magnifying glass, given its diminutive size.

"I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out the right height, where it was both good for kids and not too low where adults had to bend way over," Spana said. "I made marks on my office wall trying to find that height. We tested it out with the real sample last night, and it worked well."

Located just within the main entrance to Space Center Houston, along the path that visitors take to access the Starship Gallery, Lunar Samples Vault and the outdoor display of NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft in Independence Plaza, the new OSIRIS-REx exhibit also includes a video presentation that briefly explains the history of the mission and provides a 360-degree close-up look at the sample on display, as well as a computer tomography scan exposing the rock's interior.

"It has a high carbon content with oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. And what's really cool about that from the scientists' point of view is the fact that — speaking of hydrogen and oxygen — the clay is saturated with water. So those are all the building blocks of what you need for life, and that is one of the most exciting discoveries they have made studying the samples at Johnson Space Center," said Spana.

Guests wanting to know more about the sample can catch brief presentations by Space Center Houston crew members once every hour in front of the exhibit.

The sample is on loan from NASA for two years, though Spana is optimistic that the agreement will be renewed.

To celebrate the sample's debut, the first 200 visitors to see the exhibit on Friday were each gifted a 3D-printed model of Bennu as a commemorative keepsake. For those who were unable to attend or who came later, Space Center Houston has provided the file for the model on its website for anyone to download and print for themselves.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. was the first to receive a sample and unveiled its piece of Bennu in November.

The University of Arizona Alfie Norville Gem and Mineral Museum in Tucson is set to reveal the third and last fragment of the asteroid to go on public display on Wednesday (March 6). The evening event will include a presentation by OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, who is also a regents professor and the director of the Arizona Astrobiology Center at the University of Arizona.

Space Center Houston will also feature members of the OSIRIS-REx team, who are working to analyze and catalog the samples at Johnson Space Center. 

Salvador Martinez, lead astromaterial curation engineer for OSIRIS-REx, Nicole Lunning, lead OSIRIS-REx sample curator, and Justin Filiberto, branch chief of the research office and acting branch chief of curation within the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division at Johnson Space Center, are scheduled to take part in a Thought Leaders Series presentation in late March.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2024 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

The solar system is filled with billions of small rocky bodies and icy objects, many of which formed around 4.5 billion years ago when planets like the Earth were forming around the sun. Space missions like NASA's OSIRIS-REx, Lucy, and Psyche have been making strides in visiting these primordial solar system bodies. They've been collecting images, and OSIRIS-REx even snagged a few samples, for investigation here on Earth — all informed by data collected by observatories across the globe. 

Rubin, which will see its "first light" in 2025, will be capable of detecting millions of new asteroids, comets and potentially even bodies passing through our planetary backyard from other systems. Take Oumuamua, for instance, which was first spotted in 2017. After detecting these bodies, Rubin will then quickly track them as they move around the solar system and tread close to Earth — or even if they remain in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

Related: Dark energy is forcing the universe to expand. This new observatory may show us how

"Nothing will come close to the depth of Rubin's survey and the level of characterization we will get for solar system objects," Siegfried Eggl, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Lead of the Inner Solar System Working Group within the Rubin's Solar System Science Collaboration, said in a statement. "It is fascinating that we have the capability to visit interesting objects and look at them close-up. But to do that, we need to know they exist and where they are. 

"This is what Rubin will tell us."

Picking out asteroid muses

Rubin will monitor solar system bodies and cosmic objects that quite far out, beyond even the limits of the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, as it conducts its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

Scanning the entire southern hemisphere sky every few nights with an 8.4-meter, fast-moving telescope and the largest digital camera in the world, Rubin is expected to vastly increase our catalog of known solar system objects that has been built over 200 years — by at least 5 times, scientists project.

Not only will Rubin, presently under construction on the mountain Cerro Pachón in northern Chile, spot a multitude of new solar system objects, but scientists also expect it to gather more information about the broader "spacescape" of the solar system. 

This could reveal whole regions that contain unique objects to consider as future space mission targets.

"If you think of Rubin as looking at a beach, you see millions and millions of individual sand grains that together constitute the entire beach. There might be an area of yellow sand, or volcanic black sand," Eggl said. "A space mission to an object in that region could investigate what makes it different. Often, we don’t know what’s weird or interesting unless we know the context it’s in."

The observatory will be further able to alert operators to changes in the night sky within 60 seconds of spotting them, which could help space agencies quickly plan and deploy a mission toward rapidly moving objects of interest.

This could also give scientists an early warning of an interstellar object like Oumuamua as it passes through the solar system, for instance, allowing teams to study the intruder in situ before it slips out of reach and back into deep space. 

"Rubin is capable of giving us the prep time we need to launch a mission to intercept an interstellar object," Eggl added. "That's a synergy that's very unique to Rubin and unique to the time we’re living in."

One project that is already gearing up to take advantage of Rubin data is the JAXA/European Space Agency Comet Interceptor mission that will launch in 2029. The Interceptor will await sighting of a visitable, long-period solar system comet or interstellar object as it passes in front of the sun. Then, it will be deployed for investigtaion.

Rubin could also assist with missions concerning interesting objects located close to the passage of a spacecraft as it conducts its primary mission. 

One active mission that could benefit from Rubin's eye on the solar system is NASA's asteroid-hopping spacecraft, Lucy. The 12-year mission is set to perform the first in situ study of the Trojan asteroids, two families of space rocks that share Jupiter's orbit around the sun.

Rubin could spot smaller, fainter asteroids that lie near Lucy's path to Jupiter, offering the NASA mission some new and unexpected fly-by opportunities. 

"With our current telescopes, we’ve essentially been looking at the big boulders on the beach," Eggl concluded. "But Rubin will zoom in on the finer grains of sand."

On January 10, a group of NASA technicians finally removed two stubborn fasteners that had locked away the precious cargo, allowing scientists unprecedented access to the asteroid material, according to a NASA statement.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made history in September 2023 when it became the first U.S. mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth. The sample was stored securely within a return capsule, tantalizingly close but out of reach due to two stuck fasteners that the team's limited number of approved tools were unable to pry open. 

Related: NASA's 1st asteroid sample is rich in carbon and water, OSIRIS-REx team finds

While 70.3 grams (2.48 ounces) of material had already been accessed from the outside of the sampler head, known as the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), the bulk of the asteroid sample material remained trapped within the capsule.

According to NASA's statement, the bulk of the asteroid material is now accessible after two of the 35 fasteners on TAGSAM that could not be removed using the existing tools approved for use inside the OSIRIS-REx sample container were finally freed.

With the fasteners finally removed, the astromaterials curation team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston will proceed with disassembling the TAGSAM head to access the remaining asteroid material. This material includes dust and rocks of up to about 0.4 inches (one cm) in size. The final mass of the sample will be determined in the coming weeks.

NASA plans to release a catalog of all the Bennu samples later this year, which will enable scientists and institutions worldwide to submit requests for research or display, opening up new avenues of scientific exploration.

Asteroid Bennu, believed to be a primitive space rock dating back to the early days of our solar system, has the potential to provide invaluable insights into the formation and evolution of celestial bodies. Studying samples collected from its surface could unlock essential clues about our cosmic neighborhood, furthering our understanding of the universe's mysteries.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that collected the samples, meanwhile, has changed names and missions. Now called OSIRIS-APEX, the probe is on a five-year journey to study the asteroid Apophis— named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos— as it approaches our planet.

However, the bulk of the asteroid sample material remained trapped inside the capsule when two of the 35 fasteners on TAGSAM could not be removed with existing tools approved for use inside the OSIRIS-REx glovebox, which ensures the asteroid samples are not contaminated during processing. Thankfully, researchers were able to develop new tools that could tackle the stubborn fasteners, according to a statement from NASA. 

Related: NASA's 1st asteroid sample is rich in carbon and water, OSIRIS-REx finds

"Our engineers and scientists have worked tirelessly behind the scenes for months to not only process the more than 70 grams of material we were able to access previously, but also design, develop, and test new tools that allowed us to move past this hurdle,"  Eileen Stansbery, division chief for ARES (Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science) at NASA, said in the statement. "The innovation and dedication of this team has been remarkable. We are all excited to see the remaining treasure OSIRIS-REx holds."

The team created two new multi-part tools, including custom-fabricated bits made from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel, which is the hardest metal approved for use in the curation gloveboxes. The tools were tested during removal procedures in a rehearsal lab to ensure they would be able to achieve the torque needed without damaging the TAGSAM head or contaminating the samples, according to the statement. 

"In addition to the design challenge of being limited to curation-approved materials to protect the scientific value of the asteroid sample, these new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight and potential arc movement," Nicole Lunning, OSIRIS-REx curator at NASA, said in the statement. "The curation team showed impressive resilience and did incredible work to get these stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head so we can continue disassembly. We are overjoyed with the success."

Once the team completes the disassembly, they'll be able to weigh the full sample to determine the total mass collected from Bennu. Image specialists will also take ultra-high-resolution pictures of the samples before removing them. NASA plans to distribute a portion of the asteroid samples to the scientific community for further research later this spring.  

Asteroid Bennu is believed to be a primitive space rock that has been roaming space since the early days of our solar system. Therefore, studying samples collected from the surface of the asteroid could reveal new clues about our cosmic neighborhood. 

After bringing a sample back from asteroid Bennu, the craft was recently rebranded the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Apophis Explorer (OSRIS-APEX) in recognition of this "bonus mission."

The close approach of Apophis, which is thought to be 1,115 feet (340 meters) across almost as wide as the Empire State Building is tall, on April 13, 2029, will see the space rock come as close to Earth as 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometres), closer than some satellites.

"OSIRIS-APEX will study Apophis immediately after such a pass, allowing us to see how its surface changes by interacting with Earth’s gravity," OSIRIS-APEX project scientist Amy Simon said in a statement.

Related: Asteroid Apophis will visit Earth in 2029. Why do scientists want NASA to send a probe there first?

Apophis became notorious in 2004 as an asteroid that could potentially impact Earth with a size great enough to pose a threat to our planet. However, in March 2021, observations of the orbit of the space rock, also known as Asteroid 99942, led astronomers to conclude that it poses no threat to Earth for at least 100 years. 

NASA scientists still want to know how the brush with Earth in 2029 will affect the 324-day orbit of Apophis around the sun. Additionally, coming close to Earth, which Apophis only does around once every 7,500 Earth years, may shake up the surface of the asteroid by triggering quakes and landslides.

Though this sounds catastrophic, it could reveal what lies beneath the surface of Apophis, and OSIRIS-APEX will be on hand after the encounter to investigate any secrets that are revealed.

"The close approach is a great natural experiment," OSIRIS-APEX principal investigator and University of Arizona scientist Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina said. "We know that tidal forces and the accumulation of rubble pile material are foundational processes that could play a role in planet formation. They could inform how we got from debris in the early solar system to full-blown planets."

Because asteroids are composed of material left over from the formation of planets around the infant sun around 4.5 billion years ago, this investigation could reveal what the building blocks of Earth and its fellow rocky planets were. 

Apophis is made of silicate materials and nickel-iron, making it considerably different from the carbon-rich asteroid Bennu, which OSRIS-APEX visited under its prior moniker in Oct. 2020 to collect a sample that it dropped off at Earth in September 2023 before continuing on its mission.

OSIRIS-APEX will reach Apophis shortly after the asteroid makes its closest approach of Earth on April 13, 2029, and will operate around the asteroid for approximately six months. During this time, the spacecraft will perform some of the same investigations that it did during its time at Bennu — analyzing the surface and chemical makeup of Apophis.

And just as it did at Bennu, OSIRIS-APEX will cap this investigation off by dropping to within around 16 feet (5 meters) of the surface of Apophis and blasting it with its thrusters, further displacing surface material to get closer to the heart of the Empire State Building sized space rock.

"We learned a lot at Bennu, but now we’re armed with even more questions for our next target," Simon concluded. 

Update 1/3: NASA has clarified that, though Apophis makes its closest approach of Earth on April 13, 2029, OSIRIS-APEX will only arrive at its target shortly thereafter. This article has been updated to reflect this.

"We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the early solar system, which is exactly what we were hoping when we first conceived this mission almost 20 years ago," Dante Lauretta, the mission's principal investigator, said at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference being held this week in California and online. "I fully expect the cosmochemistry community is going to go to town on this."

Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona, said the bits of the ancient asteroid that have been retrieved so far are from the outer lid of the sample capsule and are rich in carbon and organic molecules. All the particles are very dark in color and consist of centimeter- and millimeter-sized "hummocky boulders" that have a rough "cauliflower-like texture," said Lauretta. "They cling to everything we touch them with."

Related: OSIRIS-REx: A complete guide to the asteroid-sampling mission

The OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft was designed to be in contact with Bennu for six seconds, but it ended up plunging 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) into the asteroid's surface for 17 seconds instead. A victim of its own success, the probe dug out so much material that particles began leaking out of the sample collector's head — but they were still protected inside its outer lid. On Monday, Lauretta blamed a 1.3-inch (3.5 cm) Bennu stone that appeared to have jammed open a small flap on the head and let the material escape into the lid.

Two faulty fasteners continue to prevent technicians from removing the lid to access and catalog the bulk of the collected sample that's still trapped within the head. While they wait for new tools to be approved for use on the precious rocks, they are using tweezers to pick tiny rocks through the partially open flap, totaling the collected material to 70.3 grams (0.07 kg) — higher than the mission's mandated minimum of 60 grams (0.06 kg).

Some of that material was shipped for spectral analysis at the NASA-supported Reflectance Experiment Laboratory (RELAB) facility in Rhode Island, while another batch was sent to the Natural History Museum in London. Initial findings using spectroscopy, a scientific technique that reveals a material's makeup by studying how it reflects different wavelengths of light, show a dominant spectral signature in blue. This azure hue is currently unexplained but may mean the space rocks contain even more water than scientists initially predicted, Lauretta said, adding that more results will be shared at a scientific meeting next spring.

The material also hosts high amounts of magnesium, sodium and phosphorus, a combination that so far puzzles the team.

"I've been looking at meteorites for a long time, and I've never come across anything like that," said Lauretta. "It's a head-scratcher right now. What is this material?"

The problem, which did not prevent the capsule from landing safely and softly that day, was likely caused by crossed wires.

"After a thorough review of the descent video and the capsule's extensive documentation, NASA found that inconsistent wiring label definitions in the design plans likely caused engineers to wire the parachutes' release triggers such that signals meant to deploy the drogue chute fired out of order," agency officials wrote in a blog post on Tuesday (Dec. 5).

"In the design plans for the system, the word 'main' was used inconsistently between the device that sends the electric signals and the device that receives the signals," they added. "On the signal side, 'main' meant the main parachute. In contrast, on the receiver side, 'main' was used as a reference to a pyrotechnic that fires to release the parachute canister cover and deploy the drogue. Engineers connected the two mains, causing the parachute deployment actions to occur out of order."

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

The drogue chute was supposed to deploy at an altitude of 100,000 feet (30,000 meters), helping to slow and stabilize the return capsule's descent ahead of main-chute deployment at around 10,000 feet (3,000 m).

As a result of the wiring problem, however, the drogue's retention cord was cut at deployment time, leaving the chute still in the capsule. The drogue stayed there until the capsule hit 9,000 feet (2,740 m), when the main chute opened. At that point, the drogue popped free into the air and fell away, with nothing holding it to the capsule.

But the main chute overcame the problem. Its "design was robust enough to stabilize and slow the capsule, resulting in a safe landing more than a minute earlier than expected," NASA officials wrote in the statement. "There was no negative impact to OSIRIS-REx’s Bennu sample as a result of the unexpected drogue deployment."

Bennu is the near-Earth asteroid that OSIRIS-REx visited, studied and sampled. The material that the probe snagged from Bennu's surface in October 2020 is now being processed at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. 

Once that's done, researchers around the world will study the sample, searching for clues about the solar system's early days and the role that carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in bringing life's building blocks to Earth long ago.

The return capsule's parachute-release system is inside a protective glove box alongside the Bennu sample at JSC, NASA officials said. "Once the curation team there completes processing the sample material — the mission's top priority at present — NASA engineers will be able to access the parachute hardware and verify the cause," they wrote.

There are over 600,000 known asteroids in the solar system, and over 20,000 of these are NEAs, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Most of the rest are located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. NEAs are thought to make their way out of the asteroid belt and toward Earth's orbit as they are nudged by the gravity of other solar system bodies. The majority of NEOs range from about 10 feet to 25 miles (3 meters to 40 km) wide, according to NASA. 

Related: Planetary defense: Protecting Earth from space-based threats 

Types of near-Earth asteroids

NEAs are divided into four significant families based on their orbital parameters: Atiras, Atens, Apollos and Amors.

Atiras are NEAs with orbits that are contained entirely within Earth's orbit. They are named after the asteroid 163693 Atira. 

Atens are NEAs that cross Earth's path and whose orbits have semimajor axes smaller than that of Earth's orbit around the sun. They take their name from the asteroid 2062 Aten.

Apollos are NEAs that cross Earth's orbit with a semimajor axis larger than that of our planet. They get their name from the asteroid 1862 Apollo.

Amors are Earth-approaching NEAs with orbits that bring them within the orbit of Mars but do not bring them within the orbit of Earth. Their name comes from the asteroid 1221 Amor.

One concerning category of NEAs are so-called potentially hazardous asteroids  (PHAs),  which the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) defines based on an asteroid's potential to make a threatening close approach to Earth. Specifically, this concerns the object's "minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID)"  —  the distance an asteroid is from Earth when its orbit crosses or touches the orbit of our planet  —  and the brightness of the object if it were located at the same distance from Earth as Earth is from the sun   (1 astronomical unit, or AU),  known as absolute magnitude. 

PHAs must have a MOID of around 4.65 million miles (7.48 million km), or 0.05 AU, and an absolute magnitude of 22 or brighter. Because MOID is used to calculate the diameters of asteroids, bodies smaller than 460 feet (140 m) wide are not classified as PHAs, no matter how close they come to Earth, per CNEOS. 

Only a small fraction of NEAs are considered potentially hazardous, but their potential threat to our planet means that space agencies across the globe are working hard to identify and track these dangerous space rocks.

Near-Earth asteroids FAQs

How do we track near-Earth asteroids?

A great deal of asteroid tracking data is collected by NASA-funded observatories, such as the University of Hawaii's Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), the Catalina Sky Survey, and the University of Hawaii's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS).

Data regarding the positions of NEAs around Earth are gathered by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC). The MPC handles the identification, designation and orbit computation for these objects and then announces discoveries to space agencies such as NASA. 

Once a potential NEA is discovered, the object is followed up on by projects such as NASA's space-based Near-Earth-Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope, along with planetary radar projects, like JPL's Goldstone Solar System Radar Group. 

The science of NEAs falls to several bodies within NASA. For instance, CNEOS characterizes the orbits of all currently known NEOs and then predicts their close approaches to Earth. With this information, CNEOS can make comprehensive impact hazard assessments, which are supplied to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office in Washington, D.C.

Performing long-term assessments and predicting PHAs' orbits with the Sentry impact monitoring system, CNEOS also maintains the Scout system, which monitors potential NEAs to assess possible impacts. After an NEA is detected but before it is confirmed, it is placed on the Minor Planet Center's NEO Confirmation Page (NEOCP). The Scout system then monitors these candidate NEAs over the coming days and weeks to assess their trajectory and possible impacts. 

Once the NEA is confirmed, it is removed from the NEOCP. Then, all of the data are compiled in the Sentry risk table ,  which lists the NEAs with the greatest probability of impacting Earth over the next 100 years. This is probability-based, because it takes many years of observations to constrain the orbit of an NEA, and even then, there are measurement uncertainties. 

What are the dangers of near-Earth asteroids?

Earth is under constant bombardment from space rocks. NASA estimates that around 48.5 tons (44 metric tons) of material falls to Earth every day, most of which burns up in the atmosphere and occasionally creates "shooting stars." According to NASA, space rocks smaller than about 82 feet (25 m) will most likely burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere and thus cause little or no damage.

Earth's geological history is a stark reminder, however, that larger asteroids can make it through the atmosphere and that impacts by large space debris can have disastrous consequences. This is particularly evident in the case of the asteroid that caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 66 million years ago, which eliminated 80% of plant and animal species on Earth, including the nonavian dinosaurs. 

Because of the destructive capacity of asteroids, CNEOS has a role in addition to monitoring real asteroids around Earth: It conducts hypothetical asteroid impact exercises, which have given us an idea of the kind of devastation that would result from a collision within an NEA. 

Fortunately, NASA suggests that the larger an asteroid is, the less likely it is to impact Earth. While around 100 tons (90 metric tons) of dust- and sand-size particles reach Earth every day, a roughly car-size asteroid strikes Earth's atmosphere around once a year, burning up and resulting in a fireball over Earth. 

Around every 2,000 years, Earth encounters an asteroid around the size of a football field — about 330 feet (100 m) wide. The significant destruction caused by such an impact would be localized, with the asteroid likely vaporizing just over Earth's surface and destroying buildings within a radius of 9 miles (14 km) and shattering windows within a radius of around 60 miles (100 km). More widespread damage could be caused by seismic tremors and rock hurled into the atmosphere by such an impact. 

During a CNEOS asteroid impact exercise in April 2023, NASA researchers revealed the damage that would result from impacts of larger asteroids. 

For example, a 1,000-foot-wide (300 m) asteroid could represent destruction on a continental scale, releasing as much energy as the detonation of 2,000 megatons of TNT — equivalent to 133,000 times the estimated energy released by the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Earth experiences an impact from such a body around every 70,000 years. 

The devastation would grow significantly for a 2,000-foot-wide (600 m) asteroid. An impact with an asteroid this size would border on global catastrophe, releasing as much as 20,000 megatons of energy. This means a doubling in asteroid size has resulted in an increase in devastation power by a factor of 10. Fortunately, asteroids of this size are predicted to hit Earth just once every 200,000 years or so.

For a 3,330-foot-wide asteroid (about three times as tall as the Eiffel Tower), an impact scenario as calculated by CNEOS would become dire. Indeed, asteroids of this size are considered potential "planet killers." A planet-killer impact would release around 100,000 megatons of energy — equivalent to 6.6 million detonations of the Hiroshima nuclear blast. These impacts are estimated to occur around once every 700,000 years. 

The dinosaur-killing asteroid, known as the Chicxulub impactor, had an estimated width of 6.2 miles (10 km) and released around the same amount of energy — 720 megatons of TNT — when it hit what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico at around 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h). Asteroids above 3 miles (5 km) in width, like the Chicxulub impactor, are predicted to strike Earth once every 30 million years.

According to the University of California, Berkeley, size isn't the only characteristic that affects how much damage an NEA would cause if it hit Earth. Other factors include the asteroid's composition (for example, is it a loose rubble pile or a whole lump of iron?) as well as the angle and speed of the impact and whether the asteroid hits Earth on land or in the ocean. 

Additional resources

If you're worried about potential NEA encounters, you can keep an eye on NASA's Sentry risk table. If you'd like to estimate the damage that could result from an asteroid of a specific size and density, the Earth Impact Program, from Imperial College London and Purdue University, is a great resource. It also allows you to input hypothetical impacts on land or water and even vary the depth of water in which the space rock lands. On YouTube, math professor Nils Berglund simulates what would happen if an asteroid struck Earth in the North Pacific Ocean. 

Bibliography

NEO Basics, NASA, [Accessed 06/10/23], [https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/basics.html]

Asteroid Watch: Keeping an Eye on Near-Earth Objects, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, [Accessed 06/10/23], [https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch]

NEO Observations Program,  [Accessed 06/10/23], [https://www.nasa.gov/planetary-defense-neoo/]

NEO Earth Close Approaches, [Accessed 06/10/23], [https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/]

Space Safety: ESA's Planetary Defence Office, ESA,  [Accessed 06/10/23], [https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Safety_ESA_s_Planetary_Defence_Office]

But we're not talking about the mighty Trojans right now. We're talking about a little space object named Selam. 

Here is Selam's story.

On Nov. 1, Lucy flew by one of its non-Trojan targets; you can think of these like stepping stones (stepping asteroids, rather) on the mission's grander path. Asteroid number one's name is Dinkinesh, or as scientists adorably call it, "Dinky." Soon after, however, on Nov. 2, the Lucy team announced a surprise. Dinkinesh isn't just one, but rather a binary system of two asteroids! In other words, Dinky had its very own moon. The scientists were thrilled. Little did they know, Dinky was about to surprise us once more. 

Related: Strange moon of asteroid Dinkinesh is weirder than thought after NASA probe finds 'contact binary'

On Nov. 7, to everyone's shock, the team revealed that Dinky's newfound satellite itself had a newfound satellite. In particular, the team said, the original satellite was a "contact-binary," meaning it was two objects, a moon and a meta-moon, that were touching. This marked the first discovery of a contact-binary orbiting an asteroid. 

"It is puzzling, to say the least," the Southwest Research Institute's Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy, said in a statement at the time. "I would have never expected a system that looks like this. In particular, I don't understand why the two components of the satellite have similar sizes. This is going to be fun for the scientific community to figure out."

All that was left? A name. 

So, on Nov. 29, the Lucy team confirmed that we finally have a name for Dinky's little contact-binary friend: Selam. 

"Dinkinesh is the Ethiopian name for the fossil nicknamed 'Lucy,'" Raphael Marshall of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, who originally identified Dinkinesh as a potential target of the Lucy mission, said in a statement. "It seemed appropriate to name its satellite in honor of another fossil that is sometimes called Lucy's baby." 

The fossil Selam, NASA explains, was discovered by Zeresenay Alemseged in 2000 in Dikika, Ethiopia. It's believed to have belonged to a 3-year-old girl of the same species as Lucy, one of the first hominin fossils to become a household name as the Natural History Museum says. Selam, however, is thought to have lived more than 100,000 years before Lucy. Wonderfully, Selam translates from Ethiopian language Amharic to "peace," while Dinkinesh translates to "you are marvelous."

"Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous," Levison had said at the time of its moon's discovery.

Now, the team intends to study both Dinkinesh and Selam in greater detail to understand precisely how this asteroid-ception arose in the first place. Thanks to Lucy's onboard instruments such as the high-resolution L'LORRI camera and Terminal Tracking Cameras, there's probably a solid amount of information to go on.

"To assemble the final images, we must carefully account for the motion of the spacecraft, but Lucy’s accurate pointing information makes this possible," said Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland. “These images will help scientists understand the composition of the asteroids, allowing the team to compare the makeup of the Dinkinesh and Selam and to understand how these bodies may be compositionally linked to other asteroids."

It's incredible that space rock stop number one on Lucy's journey since launching in 2021 has yielded such interesting results — one can only imagine what's in store for the rest of its 12-year excursion.

When it passes closest to the sun during its orbit, a long tail of material can be seen leaving the three-mile-wide (five-kilometer-wide) rock. However, if Phaethon's tail is the stuff of usual comets — ice and carbon dioxide — then it should be visible when the comet is as far away as Jupiter, too. But it's not.

Scientists have therefore had some theories about what Phaethon might be composed of, which could explain what trails behind when the asteroid passes by the Sun. And in new research, astronomers have compared the infrared emissions of Phaethon analyzed by NASA's Spitzer space telescope to emissions of meteorites in laboratories, ultimately finding that Phaethon likely belongs to a rare class of meteorite, of which only six specimens are known. 

Related: The strange mystery of asteroid Phaethon's comet-like tail 

Namely, Phaethon's emission spectrum corresponds to a type of meteorite called the "CY carbonaceous chondrite." Conversely, other well known asteroids such as Ryugu and Bennu, targets of the recent JAXA and NASA sample-return missions, are CI and CM meteorites respectively.

All three classes of meteorites are believed to have originated during the birth of the solar system, as they all show signs of the chemical process in which water combines with other molecules to form phyllosilicate and carbonate materials. However, only the CY group seemed to show signs of drying and decomposition due to heating; it also exhibits a high iron sulfide content, which suggests a unique origin. 

Analyses of Phaethon's emission spectrum revealed olivine, carbonates, iron sulfides and oxide minerals — all of which supported the space rock's  connection to the CY class of asteroid. Carbonates in the asteroid indicate changes in water content (the drying), for instance, and the olivine is consistent with thermal decomposition of phyllosilicates at high temperatures. 

Researchers were able to show with thermal modeling how temperatures, such as those encountered when passing by the sun, might affect minerals in the asteroid that release gases. As the asteroid gets nearer the searing ball of plasma at our solar system's center, its surface temperatures can rise to 800°C, which the team says is easily hot enough for the object's carbonates to produce carbon dioxide, phyllosilicates to release water vapor and sulfides sulfur gas. 

Data from other studies on asteroids, combined with the new thermal models of Phaethon, led the researchers to believe that pressure from the gas released by the asteroid heating up could cause the rock to break down, producing small dust particles that are lifted  from its surface — a likely explanation for Phaethon's tail as it passes by the sun. 

"It was great to see how each one of the discovered minerals seemed to fall into place and also explain the behavior of the asteroid," said co-author Mikael Granvik from the University of Helsinki, in a press release. 

The research was published in November in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

DESTINY+, an acronym constructed from "Demonstration and Experiment of Space Technology for Interplanetary Voyage, Phaethon Flyby and Dust Science," will study the asteroid 3200 Phaethon — the parent of the Geminid meteor shower — and interplanetary dust.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission was due to launch next year, but the agency has now confirmed that it will be delayed into 2025 due to issues with the development of the Epsilon S rocket, Kyodo News reported on Oct. 27.

Related: Geminid meteor shower 2023: When, where & how to see it

Epsilon S is a planned successor to the Japanese Epsilon solid-fuel rocket. A rocket engine related to the new launch vehicle exploded during testing in July, forcing the delay.

3200 Phaethon is a curious near-Earth object, exhibiting characteristics similar to both asteroids and comets. This makes it both an unusual source of a meteor shower and also a target of significant scientific interest. The irregular, 3-mile-wide (5 kilometers) chunk of rock made a relatively close approach to Earth in 2017. It is the source of the Geminids, which rain down upon Earth's atmosphere every December.

The DESTINY+ spacecraft will launch from Uchinoura Space Center (USC). The 1,060-pound (480 kilograms) spacecraft will enter an initial elliptical Earth orbit. It will carry four ion engines to power its journey through space once it separates from the launch vehicle, using a lunar swing-by to accelerate it into deep space. It will also use thin-film lightweight solar array panels.

DESTINY+ will make a flyby of Phaethon, using telescopic and multiband cameras to survey the surface of the asteroid. The flyby, at a distance of 310 miles (500 km) and a relative speed of around 74,000 mph (119,000 kph), was expected in 2029, but JAXA has not provided a new date for the close approach.

The spacecraft will also conduct in-situ analysis of interplanetary and interstellar dust using the dust analyzer, developed under the leadership of the University of Stuttgart and supported by the Germany space agency DLR ("Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt"), JAXA says. The aim is to assess whether extraterrestrial dust particles and associated organic compounds arriving on Earth played a role in the creation of life on the planet.

JAXA says the mission will also demonstrate technologies such as its solar arrays and electric ion propulsion that will enable future low-cost and high-frequency deep space exploration.

The sample from an asteroid named 101955 Bennu was returned to Earth on Sept. 24,; May and fellow citizen scientist Claudia Manzoni were invited to examine visual data collected by mission principal investigator and University of Arizona researcher, Dante Lauretta.

May and collaborators searched through images taken of Bennu’s surface by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to find opportunities to apply a technique called stereoscopy — which can basically add a 3D dimensional effect and illusion of depth to a 2D image.

"We looked for pairs of images of Bennu’s surface taken from viewpoints some distance apart," May wrote in a NASA blog post. "This separation of viewpoints, known as the 'baseline,' has to be just right to give us the experience of depth and reality when the images are viewed stereoscopically."

Related: NASA's 1st asteroid sample is rich in carbon and water, OSIRIS-REx team finds 

Pairs of 2D images are required for stereoscopic imaging so a parallax effect can develop from subtle differences in both images taken with slightly different viewpoints. 

"Such viewing requires the left and right images to be delivered separately to our left and right eyes, which is how we see in 'real life.' When this is done, the small differences between the components of the stereo pair  —  known as parallax differences  —  give our brains the opportunity to instantaneously perceive depth and solidity in the image," May explained. 

Images of the Bennu sample taken after its return to Earth in the Utah Desert were prime for such a stereoscopic approach.

"In the moments when the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) head was flipped over after removing it from the avionics deck at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, photographs from many angles were captured, enabling us to find just one (nearly!) perfect pair, showing the intimate structure of just a few grains of the dark, coal-black sample," May said. "The curation team made it easy for us."

Though the best stereoscopic view of the sample and its roughly 1-centimeter-wide (0.4-inch-wide) grains of asteroid material requires the use of an actual stereoscope, it is possible to mimic that false 3D view by relaxing the eyes and effectively "staring through" the screen. 

Scientists and citizen scientists like May are keen to get a look at the material that makes up asteroids like Bennu because these rocky bodies are thought to be composed of matter that was present during the solar system's formation around 4.6 billion years ago. That means these untouched asteroids could reveal the nature of the material that collected together long ago, gathering into overly dense patches of gas and dust that surrounded our infant sun to form what astronomers call a protoplanetary disk.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, launched in 2016 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, took two years to journey the 1,720-foot-wide (524-meter-wide)  asteroid Bennu. After arriving at Bennu in August of 2018, the craft studied the asteroid from a distance for two years before dipping to the space rock’s surface and grabbing a sample. OSIRIS-REx started its 1.2 billion-mile (1.9 billion-kilometer) trip back home in 2021 and dropped the Bennu sample, safely inside a sample canister, into Earth's orbit just last month. Then, the canister descended to the ground.

But after dropping its important cargo off in orbit and changing its name to OSIRIS-APEX, the spacecraft left Earth’s vicinity once again, beginning a journey to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis. OSIRIS-APEX will reach an orbit around the 1200-foot (370-meter) wide space rock by 2029, enabling scientists to investigate yet another space rock in stunning detail. 

The Falcon Heavy — the second-most powerful rocket currently in operation, after NASA's Space Launch System — launched the agency's Psyche asteroid mission from Kennedy Space Center in Florida this morning (Oct. 13).

It was the eighth liftoff overall for the Heavy and its fourth already in 2023. But the sight of the triple-core rocket climbing into the sky — and coming back down to Earth — was still a dazzling one, as the photos below make clear.

Related: NASA's Psyche asteroid probe on track for October launch after 1-year delay

Psyche now has a long road ahead of it. The spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at its namesake, a 173-mile-wide (280 kilometers) metallic object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, in 2029.

The probe will then study the asteroid Psyche up close for about two years. Scientists think the space rock may be the exposed core of an ancient planetary building block, so the mission's observations could shed considerable light on our solar system's early days, the formation of planets and the characteristics of Earth's core.

Update for 10:30 am ET: NASA's Psyche asteroid mission successfully launched into space atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 10:19 a.m. EDT on Oct. 13, lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Read our wrap story here.

SpaceX's powerful Falcon Heavy rocket will send NASA's Psyche asteroid mission skyward today (Oct. 13), weather permitting, and you can watch the action live.

The Falcon Heavy is scheduled to launch the Psyche spacecraft today at 10:19 a.m. EDT (1419 GMT) from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. That assumes Mother Nature cooperates, which is certainly no guarantee on the stormy Space Coast; current forecasts predict just a 40% chance of weather good enough for launch. 

You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, beginning about 45 minutes before liftoff. 

Related: NASA's Psyche asteroid probe on track for October launch after 1-year delay

If all goes according to plan, Falcon Heavy's two side boosters will come back to Earth for a landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to KSC, about 8.25 minutes after liftoff. It will be the fourth launch and landing for each booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. 

The Falcon Heavy's central core booster is flying for the first and only time today. It will splash into the Atlantic Ocean when its launch work is done.

The Heavy's upper stage, which sits atop the central booster, will finish carrying Psyche to space and deploy it there about 62.5 minutes after launch. 

The probe will then begin its long deep-space journey to Psyche, a bizarre metallic asteroid that lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

Scientists think the space rock Psyche, which is about 173 miles (280 kilometers) wide, may be the exposed core of an ancient protoplanet — a type of object they've never seen up close before. Psyche will reach its space rock target in 2029, then study it from orbit for about two years thereafter. 

If bad weather or a technical issue scuttles today's launch attempt, SpaceX and NASA can try again soon: The mission has daily liftoff opportunities through Oct. 25.

The Falcon Heavy, the second-most powerful rocket in operation today, has flown seven times to date. The Psyche mission will be the rocket's first for NASA.

SpaceX's powerful Falcon Heavy rocket is ready to launch its first-ever NASA mission tomorrow (Oct. 13).

The Falcon Heavy rolled out to Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday (Oct. 10) ahead of an originally planned Thursday (Oct. 12) liftoff of NASA's Psyche asteroid mission. But NASA and SpaceX delayed the launch by a day to wait out some bad weather brewing on the Space Coast.

If all goes according to plan, Psyche will now launch tomorrow at 10:19 a.m. EDT (1419 GMT). You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA and SpaceX. 

Related: NASA's Psyche asteroid probe on track for October launch after 1-year delay

The Falcon Heavy consists of three strapped-together first stages of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. The central booster is topped with an upper stage and the payload.

The Heavy — the second-most powerful rocket flying today, after NASA's Space Launch System — has flown seven times to date, most recently in July of this year. None of those missions were for NASA, however.

The two side boosters that will help launch Psyche tomorrow are spaceflight veterans, as their sooty appearance suggests: They have participated in three of seven Falcon Heavy launches to date, according to a SpaceX mission description. Both side boosters are expected come back once again if all goes smoothly, touching down in Florida shortly after liftoff.

The central booster, on the other hand, will be making its first and only flight tomorrow. It's slated to fall into the Atlantic Ocean after it finishes powering Psyche skyward.

The Psyche mission will study the bizarre metallic asteroid of the same name up close, providing key insights about the solar system's early days and the planet-formation process. (Astronomers think Psyche may be the exposed core of an ancient protoplanet.)

The 173-mile-wide (280 kilometers) Psyche lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Psyche probe is scheduled to reach the space rock in 2029, then scrutinize it from orbit for at least 26 months.

Current forecasts call for a 50% chance of good enough weather to allow a launch tomorrow. The Psyche mission has daily launch opportunities through Oct. 25.

Psyche, NASA's probe to explore a metal asteroid of the same name, was scheduled to launch on Thursday morning (Oct. 12) on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Pad 39A here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. However, during a prelaunch press briefing on Wednesday (Oct. 11) , bleak predictions for the next morning’s forecast left only a 20% chance of favorable weather conditions. 

As Wednesday night’s storms blew in, the decision was made to forgo Thursday’s launch attempt to capitalize on the better weather predicted for launch windows on Friday and Saturday (Oct. 14).

Related: NASA's Psyche metal asteroid mission will have a big impact on astronomy. Here's how

Arlena Moses, launch weather officer with the U.S. Space Force, was at Wednesday’s press briefing and explained the growing concerns. 

"One of the main watch items now has kind of shifted from just the storms in the area to our liftoff winds," Moses said. "Behind this warm front and especially with that area of low pressure coming towards us, we expect winds to pick up very quickly out of the south and southwest. We could see 20 to 25 miles an hour [32 to 40 kph], likely some stronger gusts with that as well."

Those conditions were expected to persist through Thursday’s launch window, prompting mission teams Wednesday evening to make the decision to delay until Friday. 

"For our first backup window, Friday morning, 50% chance for go conditions, with our concerns still being associated with storms in the area, where we have anvil clouds, some thick clouds, which are layered clouds, as well as cumulus clouds we get associated with storms," Moses explained during the briefing. 

"Looking at Saturday morning, a third backup window, there is still about the same probability, about 50% chance of go, and fairly similar conditions here, where there may be some storms around, but we expect most of any storms to be after our morning launch window," she added.

The decision to forgo Thursday's window may also have to do with characteristics of Psyche's launch vehicle. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy has limited launch recycle attempts, meaning the rocket can be fully fueled for launch up to two times before needing maintenance enough to delay launch more than a couple days. 

Tim Dunn, NASA's senior launch director for the Launch Services Program, touched on some of the resource constraints during Wednesday's briefing. "The limitations for recycled attempts is due to the vast quantity of densified LOX (liquid oxygen) that we use with the Falcon Heavy configuration," he explained. After a second fueling attempt, "we would be down about five days to replenish the LOX in the ground sphere and get it into a dissipated state," Dunn said. 

So NASA is now aiming for Friday's 50% "go" window, with Saturday's similar coin toss chance of favorable launch conditions as a backup. The new plan allows a higher probability of success should the first launch attempt scrub closer to T-0 in the countdown.

Psyche's launch window runs through Oct. 25. After it gets off the ground, the probe will head toward the asteroid Psyche, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers think the bizarre metallic body may be the exposed core of a protoplanet; the Psyche mission will help them take its measure.

That mission, OSIRIS-REx, delivered pieces of the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) Bennu to Earth late last month. NASA gave the world its first look at the sample today (Oct. 11) during a live webcast event, which also provided a rundown of the first analyses performed on the off-Earth material.

Those very early scientific returns are promising, showing that Bennu is rich in both water and carbon-containing compounds, mission team members said.

"The OSIRIS-REx sample is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever delivered to Earth and will help scientists investigate the origins of life on our own planet for generations to come," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement today. 

"Almost everything we do at NASA seeks to answer questions about who we are and where we come from," Nelson added. "NASA missions like OSIRIS-REx will improve our understanding of asteroids that could threaten Earth while giving us a glimpse into what lies beyond. The sample has made it back to Earth, but there is still so much science to come — science like we've never seen before." 

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu on Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu in December 2018. The probe spent the next 22 months studying the space rock from orbit and searching for the right place to swoop down and grab a sample.

That sampling run took place in October 2020, and it provided a fair bit of drama: Bennu's surface turned out to be surprisingly porous, and OSIRIS-REx sank deeply into it. 

But the probe emerged with a bounty — so much material that its collection mechanism got clogged, allowing some asteroid dirt and pebbles to escape into space. OSIRIS-REx still managed to secure most of the Bennu bits in its sample container, and the probe headed toward Earth in May 2021.

The journey home wrapped up on Sept. 24, when OSIRIS-REx's return capsule landed in the desert of northern Utah. A day later, the sample arrived at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, where it's being processed, curated and stored.

That work has only just begun. For example, mission team members still don't know exactly how much material OSIRIS-REx hauled home. They think it's about 8.8 ounces (250 grams) — far higher than the mission requirement of 2.1 ounces (60 g) — but that's just an estimate, calculated while the return capsule was still in space.

JSC will distribute parts of the Bennu sample over the coming months and years to researchers around the world, who will study it in great detail. 

Their work will determine, among other things, the identity of the carbon compounds, which could shed light on how life got started here on Earth. (Many researchers think carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu seeded our planet with life's building blocks long ago, via impacts.)

And Bennu is a relic of our solar system's planet-building era, so taking the rock's measure will help us understand the formation and evolution of our cosmic backyard on a larger scale, mission team members said.

"As we peer into the ancient secrets preserved within the dust and rocks of asteroid Bennu, we are unlocking a time capsule that offers us profound insights into the origins of our solar system," Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, said in the same statement. 

"The bounty of carbon-rich material and the abundant presence of water-bearing clay minerals are just the tip of the cosmic iceberg," he said. "These discoveries, made possible through years of dedicated collaboration and cutting-edge science, propel us on a journey to understand not only our celestial neighborhood but also the potential for life's beginnings. With each revelation from Bennu, we draw closer to unraveling the mysteries of our cosmic heritage."

The journey isn't over for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, by the way. Though its return capsule is now back on Earth, the probe keeps on flying, toward another asteroid called Apophis. OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to arrive at that space rock in 2029 and study it up close, on an extended mission called OSIRIS-APEX.

SpaceX rolled the Falcon Heavy out to Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday (Oct. 10). If all goes according to plan, the rocket will launch NASA's Psyche spacecraft toward a bizarre metal asteroid, also called Psyche, on Thursday morning (Oct. 12).

But Mother Nature may not cooperate with that plan: Current forecasts predict just a 20% chance of weather good enough for a launch on Thursday, NASA officials said in an update on Tuesday. The Psyche mission has backup launch opportunities through Oct. 25.

Related: NASA's Psyche asteroid probe on track for October launch after 1-year delay

The Falcon Heavy will send Psyche toward its namesake, a roughly 173-mile-wide (280 kilometers) object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

The spacecraft will reach its target in 2029, then study the metallic asteroid up close for at least the next 26 months. Astronomers think Psyche may be the exposed core of an ancient protoplanet, so the mission's observations could reveal a great deal about these planetary building blocks and the solar system's early days more generally.

The Falcon Heavy consists of three strapped-together first stages of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the central core of which is topped by an upper stage and the payload.

The Heavy — the second-most powerful rocket currently in operation, after NASA's Space Launch System — debuted in February 2018, on a test flight that sent Elon Musk's red Tesla Roadster into orbit around the sun. 

The rocket has flown seven times to date, most recently in July of this year. Psyche will be its first mission for NASA.

Update for 1 p.m. ET: NASA has revealed the samples of asteroid Bennu, announcing they have already discovered them to be rich in water and carbon.

NASA will unveil to the world today (Oct. 10) the fruits of its first asteroid sample-return mission.

The agency will host a webcast today at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) to reveal the asteroid dirt and gravel that its OSIRIS-REx mission delivered to Earth last month. 

You can watch the event live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency.

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu on Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

The $1.2 billion OSIRIS-REx mission launched in September 2016 toward the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, a carbon-rich space rock about 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide.

The probe reached its target in December 2018, setting a record for the smallest cosmic object ever orbited by a spacecraft. In October 2020, OSIRIS-REx swooped down and grabbed a sample from Bennu, sinking surprisingly deeply into the asteroid's surface in the process. 

The following May, OSIRIS-REx began the long journey back to Earth. That trek culminated with the parachute-aided touchdown of the probe's return capsule in the desert of northern Utah on Sept. 24.

The precious cargo hauled home by that capsule is now at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. JSC personnel are processing, curating and storing the Bennu material, which researchers around the world will study for years to come, looking for clues about the solar system's early days and how life got its start on Earth. (Some scientists think Bennu-like asteroids seeded our planet with organic molecules — the carbon-containing building blocks of life — via impacts long ago.)

Mission team members have already begun analyzing some of the asteroid material. They'll reveal some of their early results during today's webcast, NASA officials said.

We'll also get a good look at the sample and, in all likelihood, learn just how much of it there is. The mission team said that OSIRIS-REx snagged about 8.8 ounces (250 grams) of Bennu grit during its sampling dive, but that was just a prelanding estimate. (OSIRIS-REx was supposed to return at least 2.1 ounces, or 60 g, of material, a target that it almost certainly met.)

Only the OSIRIS-REx return capsule landed in Utah last month. The larger spacecraft flew past Earth, on its way to another asteroid — the notorious Apophis. The probe is scheduled to reach Apophis in 2029 and study it in depth, on an extended mission called OSIRIS-APEX.

Named for its target, this endeavor will send a spacecraft on an impressive 2.2-billion-mile (3.5-billion-km) journey toward an asteroid dubbed 16 Psyche — but what's key here is that this asteroid is far more than a simple space rock. It may very well be the surviving metal core of a planet that had its outer layers stripped away long, long ago. 

If the agency is right about that hypothesis, 16 Psyche has the potential to offer us a uniquely serendipitous way to study the core of planet Earth. This is because both are expected to have similar metallic compositions, possessing some combination of iron and nickel. But even if the team is wrong, and Psyche is actually some other type of cosmic object unlike the seed at our planet's center, there will still be cause for celebration. 

As Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator says, the second leading idea for what Psyche could be is equally as intriguing as the first — and one may actually argue it's even more tantalizing. 

Related: NASA's Psyche probe will launch to a metal asteroid on Oct. 12 — and scientists are sneaking a peek at the target

Possibly, 16 Psyche is made of material that formed really close to the sun at some point in time, then got "reduced" such that the material's oxygen atoms were disconnected from its iron atoms. In turn, the iron atoms would have become their metal form. "This is a kind of material that's been hypothesized by planetary scientists for a long time, but we haven't actually found any before," Elkins-Tanton said during the press briefing on Tuesday (Oct. 10). "So think about what this means when there's only one object like Psyche in the whole solar system."

"The other idea is that Psyche is a kind of primordial unmelted body, basically formed of the very first materials in the solar system that came together under gravity," Ben Weiss, deputy principal investigator of the Psyche mission, said during the briefing, "preserved in this primordial state ever since." In that case, we'd be looking at a stunning fossil of the ancient solar system. 

Either way, this ambitious feat (presently scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on Oct. 12) is bound to end with us adding a few footnotes to our astronomy books. Already, in fact, Psyche has marked quite a few milestones.

Sci-fi propulsion is now a reality

David Oh, chief engineer for operations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says this will be the first-ever mission to use Hall Effect thrusters in interplanetary space. What does that mean? Well basically, Hall Effect thrusters use electricity to ionize xenon gas — ionization refers to removing or adding one or two electrons from the atoms that make up a substance. In this case, the substance is a gas. 

Upon ionization, those atoms gain a charge. (Regular old atoms have neutral charges because their positive proton count and negative electron count are equal. Remove some electrons, for instance, and you lose some negativity.) The result? Ions. Then, those charged ions form an electric field which can, through a series of complicated steps, propel an object. In this case, that's the Psyche spacecraft. 

"They come out of the thruster going at 15 kilometers per second, or nine miles per second," Oh said. "That's five times faster than the speed of the fuel coming out of a regular chemical rocket."

"30 years ago when I was a graduate student, I worked on Hall Effect thrusters," he continued. "At the time, it was considered an esoteric and experimental technology of the future; it was the kind of thing that you heard about in Star Wars and Star Trek."

Now, here we are.

Tapping into this technology, the Psyche spacecraft is slated to reach its metallic target in 2029 after launching on Thursday. This does sound like a long while, but the road to getting there is so utterly complex that NASA doesn't doubt time is going to fly. "Launch is just the start," Oh said.

The route

After lifting off from our planet and separating from its Falcon Heavy rocket chariot, Psyche will begin moving toward its subject situated between Mars and Jupiter. Then, the Hall Effect thrusters come in. 

"These thrusters can operate over long periods of time; days; weeks; months," Oh said. "and this small force on the spacecraft accumulated over all that time accelerates it to the high speeds we need to be able to navigate to Mars."

Once the spacecraft reaches the vicinity of Mars, it will dip into the Red Planet's gravitational influence in order to be propelled like a slingshot toward Psyche itself. This is called a gravity assist, or as Oh puts it, a bit of "cosmic trickery."

"Then we'll restart our ion propulsion system," he said, "and use that to make the rest of our journey to Psyche."

Having reached its destination, the spacecraft will start getting into its optical navigation systems, taking pictures to help it make its way to the highest of four planned orbits around the asteroid. At this stage, lots of data will be collected about the space rock such as what its gravity field looks like by way of the team's "gravity science experiment." 

Slowly but surely, Psyche will then descend into closer orbits and ultimately approach its namesake. 

The arrival

The Psyche craft is armed with a bunch of measurement tools such as a gamma-ray neutron spectrometer that can investigate what kind of elements make up the asteroid and two magnetometers to understand the object's magnetic field.

"Psyche today is long frozen, but if it formed as a metallic core in the early solar system, it was once a molten body and has been cooling really quickly and potentially generating a magnetic field." Weiss said. "That magnetic field could be imprinted in the outer layers of Psyche's cold exterior as a kind of echo or fossil that we could then detect today." 

There's also a multispectral imager that can capture light wavelengths across the spectrum — and the gravity science experiment's scope actually also reaches into this stage. It can help scientists understand features of the asteroid such as its precise density. And as Weiss explains, this experiment quite interestingly harnesses the spacecraft's antenna, which is typically used for communication.

"It turns out you can also use this to determine the gravity field," he said, invoking the example of a train zipping by. "When it comes towards you, it's got a higher pitch. When it passes you, it's got a lower pitch. We can look at the pitch or frequency of the radio waves coming from the antenna, and figure out how fast the spacecraft is moving. We can track its disk speed as a function of its position around the asteroid — and from that we can see how lumpy the gravity field is."

In other words, if the spacecraft seems to be moving faster, it's probably going to be above a dense region. If it's moving slower, it's probably going to be above a less dense region. And so on.

Finally, on the note of communication, Abi Biswas, a technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained that the spacecraft will be transmitting all that awesome data back to our planet through a state-of-the-art Deep Space Optical Communications project. 

DSOC, in a nutshell, uses lasers to exhibit a 10 times higher data transmission rate from Mars distances when compared to regular radio frequency transmitters. "Future NASA missions, in particular those involving human exploration of Mars," Biswas said during the briefing, "demand much higher data return rates — and that's the motivation for this technology demonstration." 

On Earth, there's a 1-meter (3 foot) telescope at Table Mountain Observatory in California that transmits a laser beam up to the spacecraft. Then, the spacecraft is able to detect the beam and track it. Once it can start tracking that laser beam, it knows where to point its own laser beam. Then, it sends a downlink beam to a receiver at the 200-inch (5 meter) Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory (which is also in California.) 

"Both these laser beams are modulated which means they're flashing on and off," Biswas continued, "those flashes are timed, and the timing of those flashes is what encodes the information that's carried over these laser beams."

The open questions 

"There aren't that many completely unexplored types of worlds in our solar system for us to go see," Elkins-Tanton said. "We visited, either in person or robotically, worlds made of rock and worlds made of ice and worlds made of gas … but this will be our first time visiting a world that has a metal surface."

Some questions that arise in this regard are: What would a crater on a metal asteroid look like? Perhaps, the team says, an impact on Psyche would spur the existence of tiny little spikes on the object rather than create a plume of debris like an impact on a rocky surface would. Another question is: Might there be huge cliffs or evidence of lava flows on an object like this one? 

Per Elkins-Tanton, experts believe that there were likely sulfur-rich eruptions from volcanoes on the asteroid when it was very young. What might that have led to? Weiss suggests the multispectral imager will be key in decoding the aftermath of such eruptions. 

"One of the things that we on the team, and in fact the whole scientific community, have been asking ourselves now for a long time," Elkins-Tanton also pointed out, "is what do we think it's going to look like?"

We do know some things about Psyche already, such as the fact its surface area is about the same as the area of California and it's sort of lumpy-shaped, for instance, but we won't actually have an idea about its true visage until the space explorer gets there. "We're going to find out that our basic scientific understanding is going to be updated, and that's why we need to go," she said.

"I just want to give my thanks to the entire team. They've come through some tough times and really have done an amazing job on this mission," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division said. 

"We know we're ready and cannot wait to get launched later this week."

After traveling an estimated 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers), the spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid 16 Psyche, which is located at the far edge of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, in 2029. 

Once the spacecraft is in place, mission scientists will study the metal asteroid, which is different from the rock- and ice-dominated bodies studied in situ in the past, to learn more about how the rocky planets of the solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) formed. 

Related: NASA's Psyche probe will launch to a metal asteroid on Oct. 12 — and scientists are sneaking a peek at the target

What's so special about metal asteroid Psyche?  

Discovered in 1852, Psyche is considered one of the most fascinating objects in the main asteroid belt, and scientists have only been able to study it at a distance. Scientists think the asteroid is composed of the exposed core of a planetesimal, a small body that formed during planet formation as gas and dust around a star collapsed in dense patches. 

A planetesimal could eventually go on to gather more mass and thus become a planet. But Psyche is thought to have failed to reach planet status because it collided with other larger bodies as the solar system was forming around 4.5 billion years ago, possibly stripping the metal-rich asteroid of its outer rocky shell and exposing its iron-rich core.

That means that studying this 173-mile-wide (279 km), potato-shaped asteroid could not only help reveal more about the collisions that took place in the early solar system but also provide scientists with a proxy for the inaccessible iron core of our own planet.

Psyche seems to diverge from the solar system planets born from planetesimals. Whereas the rocks of the inner solar system planets are replete with iron oxides  —  chemical compounds of iron and oxygen atoms  —  Psyche lacks these compounds. If Psyche is indeed composed of material left over from the birth of the rocky planets, its existence could point to a different type of planetary formation that diverges from the mechanism that created Earth. 

But even if Psyche turns out not to be an exposed planetesimal core, the asteroid is still very interesting to scientists because it could mean it belongs toa population of never-before-seen primordial solar system bodies.

What's so special about NASA's Psyche mission? 

One of the most vital parts of the Psyche mission will be getting the spacecraft to this distant asteroid and then keeping it in place so its scientific instruments can do their jobs. 

To do this, the spacecraft, which measures 16.1 by 7.1 by 7.8 feet (4.9 by 2.2 by 2.4 meters), will depend on a solar electric propulsion system that captures sunlight with its large solar arrays and then converts it to electric and magnetic fields. These fields accelerate charged atoms of the propellant xenon ,  which is commonly found in plasma televisions on Earth. These atoms, in the form of blue-glowing ionized gas, are then blasted out into space by the Psyche spacecraft's four thrusters, providing the craft with propulsion that looks like something straight out of science fiction. 

According to NASA, each of these four thrusters operates one at a time, providing a force equivalent to the weight of three quarters in your hand here on Earth — which, in the microgravity and frictionless environment of space, is enough to propel the spacecraft. 

Even with these revolutionary "Hall-effect thrusters" — which, so far, have been used to get only as far as the moon — the spacecraft's journey to the vicinity of Jupiter won't be a 'straight shot." Instead, it will require a gravity-assisted slingshot maneuver around Mars in 2026, and Psyche will arrive at its metal-rich asteroid target in August 2029.

The spacecraft will then make orbits of the asteroid at a distance of around 430 miles (700 km), which will decrease as the mission proceeds. The spacecraft will use progressively closer orbital periods ,  or "regimes ,"  to investigate different characteristics of the asteroid.

During its first orbital regime (A), lasting 56 days, the spacecraft will use its magnetometer to search Psyche for an ancient magnetic field, which would provide evidence that the asteroid was once a planetary body. As the spacecraft does this, its multispectral imager will assess the topography of Psyche's surface. This will continue as the NASA orbiter draws closer to the asteroid, hopefully revealing more details of these characteristics, particularly during the next two orbital regimes (B1 and B2), which will last 192 days. 

Moving even closer to the asteroid, during the 100-day orbital regime C, Psyche's telecommunications system, which sends data to Earth and receives commands from ground control via radio waves, will be used to investigate the gravitational influence of the metal-rich asteroid. This could help better constrain its mass and density and thus the asteroid's interior composition and structure. 

During its 100-day orbital regime D, Psyche will employ its gamma-ray neutron spectrometer to get a better picture of the asteroid's surface topology and investigate the chemical elements that are abundant on the asteroid's surface. 

The Psyche mission is the result of a collaboration among several institutions, including Arizona State University, which provided the spacecraft's multispectral imager; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is responsible for mission management, operations and navigation; Maxar Technologies, which provided the chassis for the solar electric propulsion system and other hardware; and NASA's Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center, which acquired the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket for launch and will handle launch services.

You can watch the launch Thursday beginning at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) on NASA TV and directly on Space.com courtesy of NASA.

Those images, which the space agency released on Tuesday (Oct. 3), show the return capsule deploying from OSIRIS-REx on the morning of Sept. 24 and heading toward Earth.

"The sun is visible at the top of the frame, and a thin 'crescent Earth' can be seen at the left edge of the image," NASA officials wrote of the photos, which mission team members combined into a GIF. 

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu on Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

The 110-pound (50 kilograms) capsule's time as a free flyer was brief: It touched down as planned under parachutes in the northern Utah desert on Sept. 24, about four hours after being jettisoned. 

The soft landing capped NASA's first-ever asteroid sample-return effort. The capsule's precious contents — dirt and gravel that OSIRIS-REx snagged from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in October 2020 — quickly made their way to Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, where the off-Earth material is getting processed, curated and stored.

Mission team members think OSIRIS-REx returned about 8.8 ounces (250 grams) of Bennu material. That's just a pre-landing estimate, however; the exact amount is being worked out now, and will likely be announced during a webcast event on Oct. 11.

The OSIRIS-REx sample is expected to be a treasure trove for scientists to study for decades to come, NASA officials have said. Scientists around the world will scrutinize the asteroid bits for clues about the solar system's early days and the role carbon-rich space rocks like Bennu may have played in delivering life's building blocks to Earth long ago, among other lines of inquiry.

SpaceX conducted a "static fire" test of a Falcon Heavy on Saturday (Sept. 30) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, the company announced on X (formerly Twitter). 

During Saturday's test, team members briefly ignited the rocket's 27 first-stage engines while keeping the vehicle anchored to the launch pad. The trial helped prep the Falcon Heavy for the launch of NASA's Psyche asteroid mission, which is scheduled to take place from KSC's Pad 39A on Oct. 12.

Related: NASA's Psyche asteroid probe on track for October launch after 1-year delay

That liftoff will send Psyche on a long journey to its namesake, a bizarre metallic object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

If all goes according to plan, the probe will reach the asteroid Psyche in 2029, then study it from orbit for at least the next 26 months. The mission's observations could teach scientists a great deal about planet formation and the solar system's early days. Researchers think the asteroid Psyche may be the exposed core of a protoplanet, a building block whose cousins came together to build Earth and other rocky worlds long ago.

The Falcon Heavy is the second-most powerful rocket currently in operation, after NASA's Space Launch System (though SpaceX's giant new Starship vehicle will become the champ when it comes online).

The Falcon Heavy has flown seven times to date, most recently in July. Psyche will be the rocket's first NASA mission.

Psyche had been scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Oct. 5. But that's no longer the plan; the mission team has pushed the liftoff back to Oct. 12.

"The change allows the NASA team to complete verifications of the parameters used to control the Psyche spacecraft's nitrogen cold gas thrusters," NASA officials wrote in an update on Thursday evening (Sept. 28).

"The parameters were recently adjusted in response to updated, warmer temperature predictions for these thrusters," they added. "Operating the thrusters within temperature limits is essential to ensure the long-term health of the units."

Related: NASA's Psyche asteroid probe on track for October launch after 1-year delay

The one-week delay cuts considerably into Psyche's launch window, which runs through Oct. 25. 

The slip was announced the same day that the NASA, SpaceX and Psyche mission managers conducted a flight readiness review at KSC. During that meeting, a go-ahead was given to perform a "static fire" of the Falcon Heavy on Friday (Sept. 29), NASA officials said. Static fires are standard prelaunch tests, in which a rocket's first-stage engines are fired briefly while the vehicle remains anchored to the ground.

The Psyche launch will be just the eighth overally for the Falcon Heavy, the second-most powerful rocket currently in operation after NASA's Space Launch System. Psyche will be the first NASA mission for the Heavy.

The $1.2 billion Psyche mission will study a bizarre metallic asteroid of the same name. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will arrive at the 170-mile-wide (280 kilometers) space rock Psyche, which resides in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, in 2029.

Scientists think Psyche may be the exposed core of a protoplanet — the building blocks of worlds such as Earth — whose rocky outer layers were stripped away by one or more violent impacts. Humanity has never seen such an object up close before.

"I am so looking forward to seeing those first images," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Sciences Division, said during a news conference on Sept. 6. "They are going to be spectacular, when we finally get to see what this metal looks like up close."

We're just two weeks away from the first-ever interplanetary mission for SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. 

The Falcon Heavy is scheduled to launch NASA's Psyche spacecraft from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 12.

It will be the eighth mission overall for the powerful SpaceX launcher, which debuted in February 2018, and its first for NASA.

Related: NASA's Psyche asteroid probe on track for October launch after 1-year delay

The launch window extends through Oct. 25, and NASA and SpaceX may need the margin given the looming possibility of a government shutdown on Oct. 1. 

If the government does shut down, NASA will likely seek a waiver to proceed with the launch, citing it as an essential operation. But there's no guarantee that waiver will be granted.

A delay wouldn't be the first for Psyche; the mission was originally supposed to launch last year, but it was pushed back after problems were discovered with the spacecraft's flight software.

After it gets off the ground, Psyche will head toward its namesake, a bizarre 170-mile-wide (280 kilometers) metallic object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

The spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at its destination in 2029, providing great looks at a very intriguing solar system body. Researchers think Psyche might be the exposed core of a protoplanet, whose rocky outer layers were stripped away by one or more impacts.

"I am so looking forward to seeing those first images," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Sciences Division, said during a news conference earlier this month. "They are going to be spectacular, when we finally get to see what this metal asteroid looks like up close."

The Falcon Heavy is the second-most powerful rocket in operation today, after NASA's Space Launch System (though SpaceX's Starship vehicle will take the crown when it comes online).

The Falcon Heavy has launched seven times to date, most recently on July 26. Though the rocket has not yet lofted a NASA payload, it does have multiple U.S. national security missions under its belt.

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

"The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History expects to receive two samples from the asteroid Bennu this fall," said Ryan Lavery, senior press officer with the museum. "The first will serve as a cornerstone of the museum's 'Our Unique Planet' research initiative, which seeks to answer fundamental questions about the origins of life, the ocean and the continents on Earth."

"The second will go on exhibit in our Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals. It will be the first sample of Bennu put on public display in the United States, and we look forward to sharing it with our more than four million annual visitors," Lavery said. "We will announce the unveiling date in the near future."

A spokesperson for the Alfie Norville Gem and Mineral Museum told collectSPACE that a sample is expected to go on display in November and more details would be shared when available.

"As we prepare for the arrival of the OSIRIS-REx sample here at Space Center Houston, we are celebrating a scientific triumph by sharing a piece of the cosmos that reminds us of humanity's boundless curiosity and our relentless quest to unlock the mysteries of the universe," said William Harris, president and chief executive of Space Center Houston, the official visitor center for NASA's Johnson Space Center and a Smithsonian affiliate. "This celestial treasure embodies the spirit of exploration, and its presence here inspires us all to continue pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and space exploration."

While the details of the displays are still being worked out, including the size and nature of the material they will contain, the venues have been told to be ready as early as mid-November for the possible delivery of their Bennu specimen. First, though, scientists need to inspect, categorize and begin studying the contents of the OSIRIS-REx capsule.

Fortunately, there are indications that the spacecraft landed on Earth with more material than the mission was targeted to return. According to NASA, the capsule is estimated to be holding about a half a pound of rocks and soil, or about 8.8 ounces (250 grams).

"We promised the agency we would bring back 2 ounces, or about 60 grams, of material," Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx (or Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer) mission at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said at a press briefing. "We believe, based on some very clever spacecraft engineering from our partners at Lockheed Martin — measuring the momentum change on the spacecraft as we articulated its robotic arm — that we have at least four times that material."

NASA scientists on Tuesday found black dust and debris on the avionics deck of the OSIRIS-REx science canister, hinting at the material held within.

Most of that is intended for scientific study. From the specially-built curation lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the plan is to distribute portions of asteroid Bennu to a sample analysis team of more than 200 members from more than 35 globally distributed institutions. Approximately six months after the return, a sample catalog will be released, and more of the material from Bennu will be made available for research by scientists around the world for decades to come.

Of the total amount received, 4% will be delivered to the Canadian Space Agency, which contributed the OSIRIS-REx laser altimeter instrument aboard the spacecraft and which supports the Canadian co-investigators on the OSIRIS-REx science team.

An additional 0.5% of the total returned material will be provided to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) as part of a partnership between the two space agencies, which included NASA's support for JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission and the exchange of scientists and samples between the two missions.

Japan was the first to collect asteroid samples and return them to Earth with its Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 missions in 2010 and 2020, respectively.

The material retained by NASA will be held at the Johnson Space Center, though a portion will be stored at a secure backup facility in White Sands, New Mexico, similar to the procedures that were followed to protect the Apollo moon rocks from natural disasters and attacks.

Related: The moon on Earth: Where are NASA's Apollo lunar rocks now?

NASA placed the first Apollo moon rocks to go on display at the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 17, 1969, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City two months later on Nov. 16. Both exhibits drew long lines of spectators, with the latter recording a record crowd of 42,195 people in the four hours the display was open on its first day.

The six Apollo moon landing missions bought back a total of 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of material, much more than OSIRIS-REx is returning, so more exhibits were possible. Today, 135 nations, the 50 U.S. states and U.S. provinces each own gifted samples from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions. NASA has also loaned more than 80 moon rocks and lunar dust samples to museums in 23 U.S. states and 11 foreign nations.

OSIRIS-REx is the third U.S. interplanetary mission to land collected material on Earth. The first, Stardust, brought back samples from Comet Wild 2 and of the interstellar dust. NASA then launched Genesis to bring back a sample of solar wind particles. A parachute failure, though, resulted in its sample return capsule slamming into the Utah desert.

The material collected by Stardust and what could be recovered from Genesis is curated at the Johnson Space Center. The empty Stardust sample return capsule, though, was transferred for display to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2008.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2023 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

Scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston lifted the canister's outer lid on Tuesday (Sept. 26), two days after OSIRIS-REx's return capsule landed in the desert of northern Utah.

"Scientists gasped as the lid was lifted," NASA's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division, which is based at JSC, wrote Tuesday in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The operation revealed "dark powder and sand-sized particles on the inside of the lid and base," they added.

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu on Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

That powder once resided on the surface of an asteroid named Bennu, the focus of the OSIRIS-REx mission. 

OSIRIS-REx launched toward the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) Bennu in September 2016, arrived in December 2018 and snagged a hefty sample from the space rock in October 2020 using its Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM.

The asteroid material landed in Utah inside OSIRIS-REx's return capsule on Sunday (Sept. 24), then made its way to Houston by plane on Monday (Sept. 25). It will be stored and curated at JSC, where the team will oversee its distribution to scientists around the world.

Researchers will study the sample for decades to come, seeking insights about the the solar system's formation and early evolution, as well as the role that carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in seeding Earth with the building blocks of life.

But that work isn't ready to begin; the ARES team hasn't even accessed the main asteroid sample yet. Doing so requires disassembly of the TAGSAM apparatus, an intricate operation that will take considerable time.

"There is a very high level of focus from the team — the sample will be revealed with an amazing amount of precision to accommodate delicate hardware removal so as not to come into contact with the sample inside," JSC officials wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. 

And speaking of reveals: NASA will unveil the Bennu sample on Oct. 11 at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), during a webcast event that you can watch here on Space.com.

The sample — a stash of dirt and gravel that the probe snagged from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 — touched down in the Utah desert on Sunday (Sept. 24), thrilling mission team members and scientists around the world. 

But the asteroid sample stayed in the Beehive State for just a day before boarding a plane to its final destination, which it reached today (Sept. 25).

"Welcome to Houston, OSIRIS-REx! The asteroid sample arrived today in Texas where it will be curated and preserved by our team here at Johnson. The information collected could help scientists around the world investigate planetary formation, the origins of life and how asteroids might impact Earth," NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), which is based in Houston, said today in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu, a 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid, in December 2018. The probe studied Bennu up close for 22 months, then swooped in to grab a sample — marking the very first time a NASA probe had managed to collect pieces of an asteroid in space.

That dive revealed Bennu's surface to be surprisingly spongy; OSIRIS-REx sank far into the asteroid before backing away to safety. 

OSIRIS-REx left Bennu in May 2021, beginning a long journey back to Earth. At 6:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT) on Sunday, the probe released its sample capsule, which came down to Earth on the U.S. Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range about four hours later — just as planned.

The Bennu sample will now make its way to a newly built curation facility at JSC managed by the agency's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division.

The OSIRIS-REx science team — which includes more than 200 people based at 35 institutions around the world — will then study the sample for about two years in an effort to meet the mission's main science goals. As the above JSC post noted, those goals include better understanding how the solar system formed and evolved and the role carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in delivering life's building blocks to Earth.

The science team will have access to about 25% of the Bennu material, which is thought to weigh about 8.8 ounces (250 grams). Four percent of the sample will go to the Canadian Space Agency, which provided OSIRIS-REx's laser altimeter instrument. 

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will get 0.5% of the material, as part of a deal with NASA that includes collaboration between OSIRIS-REx and JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission, which returned a small sample of the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in December 2020.

The remaining 70% of the Bennu sample will remain at JSC "for study by scientists not yet born, using technologies not yet invented, to answer fundamental questions about the solar system," according to NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample-return press kit.   

Anxiety felt by onlookers was palpable as four helicopters operated by NASA and the U.S. Air Force took off just after 7 a.m. local time from the Michael Army Air Field. They were headed northwest into the barren sands of the U.S. Department of Defense's sprawling Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) nearly an hour before a capsule containing priceless samples of asteroid Bennu was set to enter Earth's atmosphere at 27,000 mph (43,450 km/h).

But emotions were much higher aboard one of the helicopters waiting for the capsule. 

During a press briefing held on Sunday (Sept. 24) in a hangar at Michael Army Airfield, Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission, described what was going through his mind while riding in a recovery helicopter to the capsule's landing zone. Lauretta was on his way to see if the mission he'd spent two decades of his life planning for would end with a successful recovery or with a smoking crater in the Utah desert.

"I was just trying to make sure I didn't totally break down in front of an international audience, right? It's like, okay, you got to keep it together," Lauretta said regarding his initial uncertainty about whether or not the capsule's two parachutes had opened as designed. Luckily, a few minutes later, word came that the main parachute indeed deployed. And soon after, Lauretta received word that the landing was a resounding success. 

"That's when I just emotionally let it go. You know, tears were streaming down my eyes. I was like, okay, that's the only thing I needed to hear. From this point on, we know what to do. We're safe. We're home. We did it."

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

Lauretta elaborated more about the tension and release he experienced as he waited to hear if the capsule's parachute had fully opened as it sped through the atmosphere. "I knew things were supposed to be happening on a nominal timeline; that I wasn't getting call outs. But again, we could have just have radio dropouts there. And then we heard 'main chute detected,' and I literally broke into tears."

"I knew the moment the chute opened, that was it. We knew what to do," Lauretta continued. "There were no surprises left. And it was overwhelming relief, gratitude, pride, awe and really trying to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming; that it was actually happening; that the chute was open; that the capsule was coming down; and we got that science treasure in hand."

The uncertainty over the parachute was caused by the fact that mission teams were unable to determine if the capsule's drogue chute had deployed or not. Drogue parachutes (or drogue chutes) are typically smaller parachutes that deploy from a craft moving at high speeds in order to either slow the craft, stabilize its movement or to help deploy a second, larger main parachute.

From their vantage points on the ground and in multiple aircraft providing live footage of the capsule's return to Earth, recovery teams were unable to see if the 31.5-inch (80-centimeter) drogue chute had deployed at 102,300 feet (31,181 meters) as planned.

During the post-landing press briefing on Sunday, Mike Moreau, deputy project manager for the OSIRIS-REx mission at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, explained that while his team is still unsure if the drogue chute deployed at all, it ultimately is a moot point because the main parachute did, in fact, deploy.

"We don't know if the drogue chute deployed. Because we don't know if we can see that in the imagery. The imagery that we saw was not positive," Moreau said. "What we do know is that the main parachute came out. It came out a little bit earlier than we expected, but that time difference was within the family of variation that we expect from the atmosphere. So, that is not really a surprise to us."

While the capsule's successful landing might be the end of this stage of the mission, drogue chute or not, it marks the beginning of a whole new chapter of groundbreaking science. 

Lauretta and other scientists around the world can now begin studying the samples and analyzing Bennu's composition in order to glean information about the chemical history of our solar system.

The rocks and dust samples taken from asteroid Bennu will be divided up for study among various scientific institutions and space agencies to help scientists around the world begin answering some of the most burning questions about our cosmic neighborhood — and possibly even help us understand how life got started here on Earth. 

Because asteroids formed when our solar system was quite young, the analysis of these samples could help reveal how water — or even the building blocks of life, such as amino acids — made their way to our planet as asteroids bombarded a young Earth. 

And, even though these samples will soon be in scientists' hands for years of study, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft isn't finished with its groundbreaking scientific mission. 

While the probe was designed to only take a sample from one asteroid, it still has plenty of science left in store. It will now make a two-year journey to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis under the name OSIRIS-APEX, where it will study the space rock up close to help scientists better understand the characteristics of yet another relic of the early solar system.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security - Regolith Explorer) launched in 2016 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida to visit asteroid Bennu and collect samples from the space rock for return to Earth.

The mission is NASA's first such asteroid sampling mission, but the third worldwide (Japan's Hayabusa-1 and Hayabusa-2 previously returned space rock samples). 

The OSIRIS-REx probe reached Bennu in 2018, spent two years orbiting its subject, and finally collected a sample from the asteroid's surface in 2020. Then, the spacecraft began its 1.2-billion-mile (1.9 billion km) return voyage on May 10, 2021.

On Sept. 24, 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission made U.S. history by returning samples of the asteroid Bennu to Earth after seven years in deep space. 

Launched in 2016, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached asteroid Bennu in October 2020 and collected samples from the near-Earth asteroid's surface. On Sept. 24, it returned those samples in a special capsule and parachute, with a landing at Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range near Dugway, Utah. See the latest on the asteroid sample-return's approach, landing and sample processing here.

The landing in 5 steps | OSIRIS-REx mission | Asteroid Bennu  

OSIRIS-REx 1 week from asteroid sample return

NASA is just one week away from the epic landing of its OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return capsule, which is packed with pieces of the asteroid Bennu. The landing, which is on track for Sept. 24, 2023, will mark the end of OSIRIS-REx's primary 7-year mission that began with a launch in 2016 and sample-collection at Bennu in October 2020. 

Scientists are excited, but also on tenterhooks, as they prepare for OSIRIS-REx's return to Earth. The spacecraft will slam into Earth's atmosphere, protected by a heat shield, and reach speeds of up to 27,000 mph before deploying drogue and main parachutes to slow itself to a more manageable 10 mph. 

As NASA prepares for the OSIRIS-REx landing, check out our latest coverage below and stay tuned for daily updates leading up to the landing itself!

OSIRIS-REx asteroid probe heads toward Earth for Sept. 24 sample delivery
NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe put itself on course toward Earth with a thruster firing on Sept. 10, two weeks before its highly anticipated asteroid-sample delivery.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission almost bit the dust — then Queen guitarist Brian May stepped in
That the mission ultimately succeeded is in part due to Queen guitarist Brian May, who meticulously created 3D images of the rubble pile to help the mission leaders identify safe landing spots.

NASA conducts crucial drop test ahead of Sept. 24 arrival of OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample
The OSIRIS-REx team performed a crucial drop test on Wednesday (Aug. 30), practicing what they'll do when the mission's real asteroid sample comes home on Sept. 24.

OSIRIS-REx science chief reveals NASA's 1st asteroid sampling mission nearly didn't make it (exclusive interview)
Dante Lauretta, the chief scientist of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, talks about the unexpected challenges of NASA's first asteroid sampling attempt in an exclusive interview.

Here's how asteroid Bennu caught NASA's OSIRIS-REx by surprise

When NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe arrived at asteroid Bennu in 2018, it didn't look like mission planners had envisioned.

"I really thought we might be in trouble there," the mission's chief scientist Dante Lauretta told Space.com. Because the asteroid's surface looked so different from how the OSIRIS-REx team thought it would, the spacecraft had to be reprogrammed in order to land on Bennu's loose, gravely surface.

But Bennu still had some more surprises in store for the spacecraft as it touched down to collect a sample. Read about how asteroid Bennu caught NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft by surprise and nearly killed it along the way in our feature here as we countdown to the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft dropping off this cargo at Earth on Sunday, Sept. 24.

Related: How asteroid Bennu caught NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft by surprise and nearly killed it along the way

How much asteroid stuff is in OSIRIS-REx?

OSIRIS-REx's descent capsule should descend on Earth on Sunday (Sept. 24), under parachutes in the Utah desert. 

Inside is a precious sample indeed: the spacecraft picked up material from a 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid named Bennu in October 2020 that likely contains information about the solar system's history. But how much material is in there?

Read more: How much asteroid material is NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe delivering to Earth this weekend?

OSIRIS-REx makes final maneuver before Sept. 24 sample delivery

NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe is on track for its historic delivery.

The spacecraft performed one last trajectory-correcting maneuver on Sunday (Sept. 17) to prepare for its Sept. 24 return of its asteroid sample here on Earth. The probe is currently about 1.8 million miles (2.8 million km) away, speeding toward Earth at roughly 14,000 mph (23,000 kph).

When it reaches about 63,000 miles (102,000 km) above Earth on Sunday (Sept. 24), it will send a capsule containing samples of asteroid Bennu down inside of a 36-mile by 8.5-mile target area in the Utah desert, where teams of NASA and U.S. military personnel will be standing by to recover it.

Related: OSIRIS-REx asteroid probe makes final maneuver before Sept. 24 sample delivery

OSIRIS-REx changed how we think about asteroids

When astronomers studied OSIRIS-REx's target asteroid Bennu through telescopes, they thought that the rock would be a solid mass. They were in for a surprise. 

OSIRIS-REx hasn't yet returned its samples of asteroid Bennu, but the mission has already shown that asteroids are much more than just rocks floating through space. In fact, their geology appears surprisingly complex.

As it turns out, Bennu is a "hellscape" of loose gravel and porous, low-density boulders, according to Kevin Walsh, lead scientist of the Regolith Development Working Group of the OSIRIS-REx mission.

The samples of asteroid Bennu taken by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft are scheduled to return to Earth on Sunday (Sept. 24). 

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft changed how we think about asteroids. Here's how.

How NASA's OSIRIS-REx will bring asteroid samples to Earth

Curious about how NASA plans to return its first asteroid samples to Earth?

The samples of asteroid Bennu currently stored inside a capsule onboard NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft are about to face the bumpiest part of their 1.2 billion-mile (1.9 billion-kilometer) journey to our planet.

There are several key steps in the capsule's landing and recovery in the Utah desert currently scheduled for 10:55 a.m. EDT (1455 GMT) on Sunday (Sept. 24). Read all about how NASA's OSIRIS-REx will bring asteroid samples to Earth in 5 not-so-easy steps.

And while you're at it, submit your favorite rock-related tracks for Third Rock Radio's "Return of the Rock" OSIRIS-REx playlist. Your picks could be chosen and highlighted by NASA's social media channels to celebrate the asteroid sample return!

Read more: How NASA's OSIRIS-REx will bring asteroid samples to Earth in 5 not-so-easy steps

OSIRIS-REx probe spotted in deep space returning asteroid sample to Earth

We just got a look at NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe in deep space as it carries its asteroid sample toward Earth.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Optical Ground Station telescope in the Canary Islands captured an image of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on Sept. 16 as it speeds towards our planet where it will release its sample capsule to land in the Utah desert on Sunday (Sept. 24).

When the image was taken, OSIRIS-REx was 2.9 million miles (4.66 million kilometers) away from Earth, having already journeyed nearly 1 billion miles (1.9 billion kilometers) since leaving asteroid Bennu.

Read more: OSIRIS-REx probe spotted returning asteroid sample to Earth (photo)

OSIRIS-REx press conference today (Sept. 22) to discuss historic landing of asteroid bits

The mission of NASA's OSIRIS-REx, short for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer, remains on track with its landing on Sunday (Sept. 24) with pieces of asteroid Bennu.

The landing is set for Sept. 24 8:55 a.m. MDT (10:55 a.m. EDT, 1455 GMT) in the desert of Utah and NASA will hold a press conference today (Sept. 22) at 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) to discuss the recovery effort.

Both events will livestream here at Space.com, via NASA Television.

Read more: What time is NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return capsule landing on Sept. 24?

One day to OSIRIS-REx landing!

NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return probe is just one day away from returning  a cupful of material from the asteroid Bennu to Earth. 

The asteroid is scheduled to touch down in a landing zone in Utah at about 10:55 a.m. EDT (1455 GMT) on Sunday, Sept. 24. About four hours before that landing, the probe's sample return capsule will separate from its mothership to begin the trip to Earth. 

Today, Space.com's Tereza Pultarova took at a look at how asteroid Bennu will visit Earth in 2182, and how NASA's OSIRIS-REx will help protect us against any possible impact.

We also look at how NASA is sure OSIRIS-REx won't bring space germs to Earth when it lands by Sharmila Kuthunur.

Meanwhile, astrophysicist Gianluca Masi will host a free livestream tonight to try and see OSIRIS-REx on its final approach with a telescope from Ceccano, Italy. You can watch that livestream here. 

Space.com's Mike Wall has a preview of what to expect for the landing, too, so be sure to check it out. 

NASA launched OSIRIS-REx in 2017 on a 6 year mission to asteroid Bennu and back. It arrived in 2020 and collected samples from the near-Earth asteroid, and is now completing its more than 4 billion-mile journey with its return to Earth. 

Mission mangers are watching weather the spacecraft to make sure all is set for the landing. If, for some reason, they decide not to separate the capsule from its mothership, it would take another 2 years for the probe to return to Earth with its samples. But so far, all systems appear to be going well.  

Landing day for OSIRIS-REx capsule: Capsule away

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has successfully released its asteroid sample capsule toward Earth, setting up today's landing in the Utah desert. 

OSIRIS-REx released the capsule at 6:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT) while it was still 63,000 miles from Earth. 

The asteroid sample capsule is on track to land just before 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City. It is carrying an estimated 8.8 ounces of samples from the asteroid Bennu.

OSIRIS-REx then fired its engines to divert away from Earth and is now headed off to the asteroid Apophis, which it will follow through that asteroid's 2029 Earth flyby. NASA has now officially renamed the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx-APEX to mark the change.

NASA OSIRIS-REX asteroid sample return webcast begins

NASA is less than 1 hour away from landing its 1st asteroid samples ever. The live webcast for OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample capsule landing has begun. 

You can watch it live in the window above. 

OSIRIS-REx's sample capsule is barreling toward Earth and will hit the atmosphere at 10:42 am ET off the coast of California. It should land about 13 minutes later at 10:55 a.m. at Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range on the Dugway proving ground near Salt Lake City.  

Recovery helicopters lift off

NASA reports that the 1st two recovery helicopters are in the air awaiting OSIRIS-REX's approach and landing. 

The sample return capsule is expected to hit the atmosphere at about 10:42 a.m. EDT (8:42 a.m. MDT/1442 GMT) at 27,000 mph.

OSIRIS-REx capsule enters Earth atmosphere

NASA's OSIRS-REx sample capsule has entered Earth's atmosphere and is streaking toward its landing site.

OSIRIS-REx capsule deploys main parachute

NASA says the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule has deployed its main parachute and is now drifting toward Earth. 

It deployed the main parachute at 5,000 feet.

TOUCHDOWN! OSIRIS-REx lands asteroid samples on Earth

TOUCHDOWN! NASA landed its first asteroid samples on Earth with the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule touching down at about 10:52 a.m. EDT (1452 GMT) at the Dugway Proving Ground Utah Test and Training Range in Utah, outside of Salt Lake City.

"And the team can breathe a sigh of relief," a NASA commentator says.

Recovery crews reach OSIRIS-REx capsule

NASA recovery crews have reached the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return capsule and are working to safeguard the capsule so it can be air-lifted to a clean room at the Dugway Proving Ground. 

The capsule is intact with no breaches, NASA reports. 

OSIRIS-REx sample capsule wrapped for recovery

NASA's OSIRIS-REx recovery team has wrapped the 120-pound asteroid sample return capsule in a protective bag and cargo carrier and net so that it can be carried by helicopter to a clean room at the Dugway Proving Ground. 

Helicopter retrieves OSIRIS-REx capsule

A recovery helicopter has successfully collected the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule and is headed to a clean room at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground so it can be prepared for delivery to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where a special facility is awaiting its arrival.

NASA recovery teams have delivered the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule to its Dugway Proving Ground processing site and are preparing to move it into a clean room in order to access the sample canister for delivery to the Johnson Space Center this week.

OSIRIS-REx samples inside clean room

Just over 2 hours after it landed on Earth, the asteroid sample return capsule from NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission was safely wheeled inside a temporary cleanroom at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to be prepped for transport. With that, NASA has ended its webcast.

A NASA press conference on the OSIRIS-REx landing is scheduled for no earlier than 5 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) today. We'll be back then with coverage of that meeting as well.

NASA will send the capsule and its contents to the Johnson Space Center in Texas, where the agency has built a special new facility to hold the samples for scientific study. The samples will be sent to JSC on Monday, NASA has said. 

The space agency has set an Oct. 11 date for the opening of the sample canister at the new facility. 

Thanks for joining Space.com for the OSIRIS-REx landing. 

NASA press conference on OSIRIS-REx landing

With NASA's successful landing of the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return capsule a success, the space agency will celebrate the historic feat - a 1st for NASA - with a press conference at 5 pm ET (2100 GMT). 

You can watch it live in the window at the top of this page. 

OSIRIS-REx mission team hails landing success

Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, says the team is overjoyed after the successful landing of the probe's asteroid sample return capsule today. 

"Boy, did we stick the landing," Lauretta said during a post-landing press conference today. 

Lauretta said there was some tense moments during the landing, especially after spending 20 years on the mission and 7 years actually flying it. One key moment was an early report that the probe's drogue chute had not been seen deploying. 

"I was just trying to make sure I didn't totally break down in front of an international audience, right? It's like, okay, you got to keep it together," Lauretta said over the initial uncertainty about the drogue chute while he was riding in a recovery helicopter. But a few minutes later, the main parachute deployed and the landing was a resounding success.

"That's when I just emotionally just let it go. You know, tears were streaming down my eyes. I was like, okay, that's the only thing I needed to hear. From this point on, we know what to do. We're safe. We're home. We did it."

NASA is now shifting to preparing the asteroid Bennu samples for delivery to a new facility at the Johnson Space Center. We will end our landing day coverage and pickup on Monday with the capsule's departure for Houston. Thanks for tuning in! - Tariq Malik

OSIRIS-REx canister gets ready for Texan trip

Part of NASA's OSIRIS-REx descent capsule is readying for a move from Utah to Houston.

The asteroid return mission from Bennu is scheduled to head next to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston after making a safe landing from space on Sunday (Sept. 24), closing out a seven-year journey.

"NASA's OSIRIS-REx clean room team has finished disassembling the sample capsule and packaging its components, including the unopened sample canister," NASA officials wrote in an update Sept. 24.

"Now packed in shipping containers – along with the environmental samples the recovery team collected around the capsule’s landing site this morning – the items are scheduled to be delivered."

NASA opens OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample canister

OSIRIS-REx's sample return canister has been opened after returning to Earth containing precious asteroid materials.

Scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston opened the lid on the canister on Tuesday (Sept. 26), two days after OSIRIS-REx's return capsule landed in a remote military base in the Utah desert. The canister contains samples of an asteroid known as Bennu.

"Scientists gasped as the lid was lifted," NASA's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division, which is based at JSC, wrote Tuesday in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The materials within will be carefully curated and divided up for study among scientific institutions and space agencies worldwide. For decades to come, the samples will be studied to help us learn more about the the solar system's formation and evolution, as well as the role that carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in bringing the building blocks of life to Earth.

Read more: NASA opens OSIRIS-REx's asteroid-sample canister (photos)

OSIRIS-REx completed NASA's first asteroid sample return mission on Sunday (Sept. 24), when its reentry capsule landed in the western Utah desert. But now the main spacecraft has embarked on a side quest: to scope out and get up close with Apophis, an asteroid previously thought to potentially pose a threat to Earth.

The spacecraft used its return to Earth to fling itself on a course toward Apophis. It fired its engines about 20 minutes after releasing the reentry capsule containing pristine material from the early solar system, effecting a trajectory change and setting it on another long, looping voyage.

Related: Apophis: The infamous asteroid we thought might hit us 

That complex journey will take OSIRIS-REx much closer to the sun than it was originally designed to get, passing within the orbit of Venus a number of times and revisiting Earth, eventually allowing it to finally rendezvous with Apophis. It is planned to reach the object, also known as asteroid 99942, on April 8, 2029.

OSIRIS-APEX will not collect samples from Apophis, but it will study the asteroid for 18 months. These proximity operations will include imaging and mapping the asteroid and a close-up rendezvous maneuver like the one used to obtain material from Bennu in October 2020. While we won't get to analyze parts of Apophis on Earth, this move will give unique insights into its subsurface, composition and properties.

Apophis is an intriguing and high-profile near Earth object (NEO). The roughly 1,100 feet (340 meters) object was once thought to have a chance of smashing into Earth in 2068. Apophis is no longer considered a threat, and the celestial dance of the solar system will instead offer a chance to get up close with this former nemesis. 

Apophis' next close approach to Earth will see it get within around 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) of us on Friday, April 13, 2029. While an inauspicious date to some, it presents humanity with a great opportunity to study the space rock and learn more about not only asteroids but also the evolution of the solar system.

Apophis is a "typical" near-Earth asteroid, Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer working on NEOs at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), told Space.com. 

"By studying it, we will learn more about these objects, most of which were formed at the same place as the Earth," Hainaut said. "In a way, you can look at Apophis and the NEOs as crumbs left over while making the Earth."

Bennu is a carbon-rich, B-type asteroid, but Apophis is an S-type, or "stony" asteroid composed mainly of silicate and nickel iron. These relics of that primordial era are common in the inner solar system and could yield untold secrets of the origins of the planets and the processes that led to their formation.

Because of its common properties, it will also be useful for planetary protection efforts. "It is super interesting scientifically and super-interesting for the protection of the Earth," Hainaut said. "While Apophis is not dangerous, we expect it to be very similar to other NEOs that could collide with the Earth."

But an asteroid may not be what it appears, as OSIRIS-REx found at Bennu: That space rock's surface behaved, surprisingly, like a ball pit. We won't know what Apophis is like until the probe gets up close and personal with it.

And OSIRIS-APEX may not be the only visit to Apophis, if scientists get their way. 

NASA's Small Bodies Assessment Group recently called for the agency to find a way to fly by Apophis before its close encounter with Earth. This would "provide a complete investigation of this remarkable opportunity to quantify and understand in real time the consequences of planetary tides on the evolution of asteroids and glean important information on Apophis' interior structure, which is otherwise unobtainable," the group stated. 

Elsewhere, a workshop is being organized for 2024 to explore international collaboration opportunities for both Earth-based observations and potential in situ investigations of Apophis.

Whether these extra missions happen or not, OSIRIS-APEX will provide more pieces of the puzzle, helping researchers understand the primordial objects in our neighborhood, our planet and how to protect it.

Houston, of course.

Wrapping up a seven-year-long, nearly four-billion-mile (6.4 billion kilometers) journey to the asteroid Bennu and back, the U.S. space agency's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft deployed its sample return capsule (SRC) to land in the Utah desert on Sunday (Sept. 24). A team of NASA scientists and Lockheed Martin engineers were on site within a minute of the touchdown to begin the process of retrieving the capsule and about half a pound (8.8 ounces or 250 grams) of rocks and soil that is estimated to be on board.

After ensuring the area was clear of any unexploded ordinance, the capsule landed as planned within the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) — and when the well-traveled hardware was safe to approach, the team began securing the capsule and loading it into a cradle. The latter was important because it allowed the capsule to soon be hoisted by a helicopter and taken to a temporary clean room at UTTR.

"When we first come into the hangar, the team there will unbag the SRC and try to clean off some of the dirt and dust that that it might have picked up. We can't get it pristinely clean, but we can knock off big hunks of the desert floor," Richard Witherspoon, Lockheed Martin's OSIRIS-REx ground recovery lead, said in an interview with Space.com. "And they will take scrapings from the heat shield and back shell at that time, which will go off for later analysis."

Related: NASA's OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

Once inside the clean room, the SRC will start getting disassembled. By this point, there's a chance scientists will get their very first look at samples from Bennu.

"We're never expecting to expose any sample while we are in the cleanroom at UTTR. The one thing that might be different though, is when we stowed the touch-and-go sample acquisition mechanism (TAGSAM) in the SRC [while still in orbit around Bennu], we did so quickly because the it was literally overflowing with regolith [soil] and the mylar flap that was supposed to be a one way valve was held open by a very large rock," Witherspoon said. "So it's possible that while we were stowing the TAGSAM, a little bit of the regolith might have escaped and gotten trapped inside of the SRC."

If that is the case, the team will carefully collect the escaped material while still in Utah.

Engineers will then remove the SRC's heat shield and backshell so the two can be trucked to Lockheed Martin's facilities in Denver for analysis. That work will also expose the "avionics deck" for what might be the most important step of this preliminary work.

"We need to get the samples under a nitrogen purge," Witherspoon said. "There's a spot on the avionics deck where we will push in a needle through which we flow ultra-high purity nitrogen. That creates a positive pressure that [prevents Earth's atmosphere from flowing in and contaminating the sample]."

The team will then wrap up the avionics deck and place the entire assembly into a shipping container before retiring for the day.

From outer space to Houston

Early Monday morning (Sept. 25), the team will come together once more to load the partially disassembled capsule onto a C-17 military transport plane for an 8:00 a.m. MDT (10:00 a.m. EDT or 1400 GMT) flight to Ellington Field in Houston.

"Once on the ground in Texas, we load all of the equipment onto a box truck and caravan from Ellington Field to Johnson Space Center," Witherspoon said. "We have a police escort while we're doing that, just in case there is traffic, but we are landing and moving before rush hour starts in Houston."

Upon arriving at Building 31 — the same facility that houses the majority of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts as well as other astromaterials collected by NASA missions — the OSIRIS-REx payload will be placed in a pair of cleanrooms.

"In the first cleanroom, we take off one of the layers of bagging, we clean everything and we get it onto the nitrogen purge that is inside of that lab. Then that's a safe place to leave the sample overnight if we need to," Witherspoon said. "But then either we will continue on that day or on Tuesday morning and move to the upstairs lab, which is called the OSIRIS-REx Curation Lab and was specially built for this mission."

The new curation laboratory has specialized gloveboxes for handling both the Bennu samples as well as the hardware used to grab material from the asteroid's surface and deliver it to Earth.

"Once the avionics deck goes into the glovebox, there is one final step that Lockheed engineers do and that is to open and take the lid off of the science canister, which then exposes the TAGSAM," Witherspoon said. "We lift that off and put it into a special fixture that curation gave us and then that is when we are done. We back away, we leave the room and the NASA-led curation team comes in and starts the disassembly of all the components."

Sample study

NASA anticipates it will take several weeks from the point the lid is opened for the team to carefully and methodically fully disassemble the hardware to reveal the pristine asteroid inside.

"Once that occurs, we will start to characterize the sample, understand better what we have, how much we have and how many different rock types and lithologies there might be within the sample," Kevin Righter, NASA's curator for the Bennu material, said during a pre-landing press briefing. "That characterization will be used to determine the material that we allocate to our international partners from JAXA [Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency] and the Canadian Space Agency, as well as determining what material will be appropriate to allocate to the science team for their studies."

It is believed the Bennu sample will help us learn how our solar system and planets evolved. The returned material will help scientists investigate planet formation and the origin of organics that may have led to life on Earth, hence the "O" in the mission's full name, "Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security–Regolith Explorer" (OSIRIS-REx).

"We believe that we're bringing back representatives of the seeds of life that the asteroids delivered at the beginning of our planet, which led to this amazing biosphere, biological evolution and to us being here today to look back on that amazing history to think about where did we come from and where are we going," said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

NASA has scheduled a press conference for Oct. 11 to provide a first look at the samples and the preliminary findings by its science team.

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah  —  NASA's first-ever samples of an asteroid in deep space have landed safely on Earth in a historic first for the United States.

In a mid-morning operation at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in the arid Utah desert, teams with NASA and the U.S. Air Force successfully recovered a space capsule with samples of asteroid Bennu taken by the agency's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2020. The mission marks the first time that NASA has taken a sample of an asteroid, not to mention successfully recovering it.

After traveling for over 4 billion miles (6.2 billion kilometers) to reach Bennu and then make the journey home, the OSIRIS-REx probe released its sample return capsule this morning while it was about 63,000 miles (101,000 km) above Earth. The capsule contains some 250 grams (8.8 ounces) of rocks and other material from Bennu, material that could help answer some of scientists' most burning questions about the origins of life on Earth and the early days of our solar system.

"Touchdown for science!" said Jim Garvin, chief scientist of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, from the landing site during a live broadcast. "For the first time in history, we brought goodies back home from this kind of object. This is so huge and we're all breathing a big sigh of relief."

Related: How asteroid Bennu caught NASA's OSIRIS-REx by surprise & nearly killed it 

The OSIRIS-REx capsule reached speeds of up to 27,000 mph (43,450 km/h) and its heatshield experienced temperatures as high as 5,300 degrees Fahrenheit (2,900 Celsius) as it descended through Earth's atmosphere.

The capsule deployed its main parachute at an altitude of about 20,000 feet, four times higher than expected at 5,000 feet, but it appeared to land safely. Officials with NASA and Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which built OSIRIS-REx, told reporters in the post-landing conference that drogue chute likely deployed, but was just not seen on cameras monitoring the descent.

"The bottom line is we landed. When the main parachute came out, that was the moment I was waiting for," Mike Moreau, OSIRIS-REx recovery team lead at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the briefing. "The drogue's on top of the main parachute, so it all had to come out," he added.

As the sample return capsule floated down to the desert floor of the U.S. Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range here, the capsule cooled down enough so that U.S. Air Force personnel could approach after locating it. 

The descent from the edge of the atmosphere to the desert sands took under 10 minutes in total to end a 4 billion-mile journey. The $1 billion OSIRIS-REx mission launched in 2016, arrived at Bennu in 2018 and collected samples of the asteroid in 2020. 

"Boy, did we stick the landing," Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission, said in a post-landing briefing.

Once on the ground, the capsule and surrounding area was examined to make sure it was safe for OSIRIS-REx team members and recovery personnel to approach and examine the capsule. An early examination by recovery teams found that the capsule was intact and suffered no breaches during landing.

From there, the capsule was hooked up to a helicopter via a longline and airlifted to a temporary cleanroom set up at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground. 

Once secure inside the facility, the capsule was opened, and the canister inside that contains the precious sample of asteroid Bennu will be prepared for transport once again. The asteroid material will next be loaded onto an aircraft and flown to NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas where a newly-built facility is waiting for it, the agency's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division. 

"Congratulations to the entire OSIRIS-REx team. You did it!" NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a video during live commentary. "This mission proves that NASA does big things. Things that inspire us, things that unite us, things that show that nothing is beyond our reach."

From there, the sample will be divided up among different scientific institutions and world space agencies. NASA will keep 70% of the sample at JSC where it will analyze it for years to come. Another 25% will be shared between over 200 scientists at 35 different facilities. 4% will be given to the Canadian Space Agency, and another 0.5% will be given to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

OSIRIS-REx is NASA's first to collect an asteroid sample, but JAXA has two such missions under its belt. That agency's Hayabusa 1 collected materials from asteroid Itokawa and returned them in 2010, and Hayabusa 2 returned sampled of asteroid Ryugu in 2020.

The successful landing and recovery of the asteroid Bennu samples marks the end of a seven-year mission that saw its share of surprises. When the spacecraft arrived at Bennu in 2018, it found an asteroid resembling more of a pile of gravel and rubble than a solid rock. Scientists with the mission then had to rethink the plan for the probe's landing, which required reprogramming the spacecraft to land in an area less than one quarter of the size of its original intended landing site.

But the OSIRIS-REx team pulled it off. Lauretta said during a pre-landing media briefing on Sept. 22 that the OSIRIS-REx team has been consistent in its ability to work through the unexpected issues that popped up. 

"We've always taken a deliberate, careful, cautious approach," Lauretta said. "And I think that's why this mission has been so successful up to this date."

Editor's note: This story has been updated at 6 p.m. ET to include comments from NASA and the OSIRIS-REx mission from a post-landing press conference after the capsule landing.

Update for 11 a.m. EDT: NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule successfully landed with samples of asteroid Bennu at 10:52 a.m. EDT (8:52 a.m. MDT/1452 GMT) in the Utah desert as recovery teams watched. You can watch its recovery live on Space.com. It is also in the window above.

The first asteroid samples ever collected by NASA are closing in on Earth for a historic landing in the Utah desert today (Sept. 24). 

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which collected samples of asteroid Bennu in 2020, released a capsule carrying that precious cargo at 6:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT) on a course to land on Earth. The spacecraft was 63,000 miles (101,388 kilometers) from Earth, about one-third the distance to the moon, when it released the sample capsule, with OSIRIS-REx itself flying past our planet to a new destination, NASA officials said. 

"After traveling for about four hours through space, the capsule will enter the atmosphere off the coast of California at about 10:42 a.m. EDT (8:42 a.m. MDT) and head east," NASA wrote in an update. "It will land about 13 minutes later in a predetermined 36-mile by 8.5-mile area on the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City." You can watch that landing live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, beginning at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT).  

Live updates: OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return landing
Related: How to bring asteroid samples to Earth in 5 not-so-easy steps

The $1 billion OSIRIS-REx mission, its name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, launched in 2016 to visit and collect samples of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, which itself will fly close by Earth in 2182. The mission is aimed at better understanding the composition of the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) Bennu and asteroids like it, remnants from the early solar system.

So far, OSIRIS-REx's sample return preparations have gone smoothly, with the sample capsule on course to reenter Earth's atmosphere just off the California coast, streaking across the morning sky and parachute to the ground at its Utah drop zone. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft itself, its job complete, is now leaving Earth behind.

At about 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT), OSIRIS-REx successfully fired its engines in what NASA calls a diversion burn so it does not fall to Earth like its sample capsule. The spacecraft is headed to a new target, the asteroid Apophis, which will also fly close to Earth in 2029. NASA officially renamed the mission OSIRIS-REx-APEX to note the change. 

"Roughly 1,000 feet wide, Apophis will come within 20,000 miles of Earth – less than one-tenth the distance between Earth and the Moon – in 2029.
NASA wrote in a separate update. "OSIRIS-APEX is scheduled to enter orbit of Apophis soon after the asteroid’s close approach of Earth to see how the encounter affected the asteroid’s orbit, spin rate, and surface."