Dante Loretta

It's still occasionally causing these asteroids to crash into each other, create a whole series of fragments, some of which come tumbling in to the inner solar system and create a transient population of near-Earth asteroids.

Once something gets on an orbit like this, it's only going to survive for about 10 million years.

against the four and a half billion year life scale of the universe, most of the time it's going to fall into the sun, but about half the time or less it's going to crash into one of these planets, which is one of the reasons that we're interested in understanding these guys.

So this kind of gives us a natural target.

You leave the earth, you find one that looks very much in orbit like our planet, you spend some time there and then

It's easy, relatively speaking, to get back to the Earth from there.

So we picked a near-Earth asteroid as our target.

And then we set off to build this awesome, awesome machine.

These are just some of my favorite pictures.

This one here is the very, very earliest stages.

This is the core cylinder of a spacecraft here.

Here you can see us dropping in the fuel tank, loading up our antenna.

installing the Polycam, this is one of the instruments we built here at the University of Arizona, and then the sample acquisition mechanism, which is kind of like a space vacuum cleaner, that's going to grab the sample and bring it back to Earth for us.

One of the coolest things that we did that really captured humanity's excitement and made people feel like they're part of the mission was we did this special microchip called the Messages to Bennu.

And so here you could either put your name on the chip,

You could put your cat's name if you wanted to.

You could send a prediction about the future.

We did an asteroid time capsule, so the sample comes back in 2023.

And we said, send us a tweet of what you think would be happening in the world when we open up the capsule in September of 2023.

And we picked the top 100 predictions.