Dante Loretta

And when we touch the surface of the asteroid, we'll open one of those up.

It's like a vacuum cleaner working in reverse.

We'll create high pressure underneath this head, which is basically an air filter.

I would say it would look really at home on the carburetor of a 57 Chevy.

basically what it does so we push that into the gravel on the surface of the asteroid we open up the gas bottle it fires the gas which then expands up through a little valve and then is collected in a chamber on the outer edges of that device that's going to take about 5 to 10 seconds so we're going to contact the asteroid for between 5 and 10 seconds once we we are confident we have a sample then we will open up our sample return capsule

and we will put that entire filter into the capsule, and then we have some bolts that we separate here.

We leave that behind, the capsule closes up, the entire spacecraft comes back to the Earth, but we spin up, and this is the only part of the vehicle that actually makes it back down to the surface.

We'll hit the top of the atmosphere about 28,000 miles an hour.

Most of that energy will be dissipated by the heat shield.

We're targeting the Utah test and training range just to the southwest of Salt Lake City.

Once the capsule gets into free fall, we open up the parachutes.

It's actually all done autonomously by the avionics on board.

And then we'll go out there and recover this.

Here's some footage from a similar capsule that was flown on a NASA mission called Stardust.

that brought comet dust particles back, and so we'll be, unfortunately, in the morning when we collect these, we'll be there at two in the morning, and then the whole thing gets transferred to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, to the same facility where the Apollo moon rocks are today, and then we open it up and see what we got, and start to unravel the history of our solar system.

So that's my day job.

As AP mentioned, I'm into really sharing that adventure, the excitement of what we're doing, and I get involved in all kinds of crazy things.

So let's see, what do we got here?

Right, so one of the things we did was put this movie together called Benny's Journey, where we brought in artists to try to capture the stories that we think Benny records.

So that was really fun to kind of take all of our science, everything in there has a scientific hypothesis.