Greg Brennecka

NASA's OSIRIS-REx, the first-ever U.S.

I was using a gloved hand due to contamination issues, but it was pretty spectacular.

We really are looking at something that has changed very, very little since its inception.

curiosity of where we came from and where the ingredients in our solar system came from and what they were.

Where we came from as humans, where we came from as planets.

One of the ways to do that is to look at samples that formed in the early solar system and analyze them and figure out when it happened, where it happened, and what it's made from.

It's a very cool way of collecting a sample, actually.

So there was a spacecraft that was orbiting the asteroid.

The scientists decided this is an area we want to land.

It's safe and it has the stuff that we want to collect.

So they picked an area that they knew they could get out of that wasn't near a lot of large boulders.

They basically went down and essentially looks like a pogo stick, fired the retro rockets and blasted off of the asteroid.

I kind of like to think of this as if somebody sends you a picture of a birthday cake, you can kind of tell what that birthday cake is made of.

You may have an idea about what it tastes like.

You don't really know.

And we can take pictures of a lot of asteroids.

We can take pictures of distant planets.

We can have ideas about what they're made from.

But we don't really know until we get it in the laboratory and really analyze it.

You don't really know until you have that birthday cake in front of you and you can taste it.