Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: GEORGE FREY / AFP 17:58 p.m., September 24, 2023
The largest asteroid sample ever collected, and the first for NASA, landed Sunday in the Utah desert in the United States. It should "help us better understand the types of asteroids that could threaten the Earth," and shed light on "the very beginning of the history of our solar system," said the head of the space agency.The largest asteroid sample ever collected, and the first for NASA, landed Sunday in the Utah desert in the United States, after a vertiginous final descent through the Earth's atmosphere, seven years after the liftoff of the Osiris-Rex probe.
The fall, observed by army sensors, was to be slowed by two successive parachutes. The main parachute, however, deployed higher than expected, and the capsule landed slightly earlier than expected, a NASA commentator said on his live video.
"The return of this sample is truly historic"
The sample, taken in 2020 from asteroid Bennu, must contain about 250 grams of material, according to the estimate of the US space agency, much more than the two previous asteroid samples reported by Japanese missions. It should "help us better understand the types of asteroids that could threaten the Earth," and shed light on "the very beginning of the history of our solar system," said the head of the space agency, Bill Nelson.
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"The return of this sample is truly historic," NASA scientist Amy Simon told AFP before the landing. It is the "largest sample we bring back from the moon rocks" of the Apollo program, concluded in 1972. The ground area was 58 km long and 14 km wide, on a military area usually used to test missiles. About four hours before the scheduled landing time, the Osiris-Rex probe released the capsule containing the sample, more than 100,000 km from Earth (about 1/3 of the Earth-Moon distance).