Matthew Powell

In the early 2000s, a team of planetary scientists at NASA began planning something audacious.

They would build a spacecraft, aim it at an asteroid, launch it across more than a billion miles of space, map the asteroid's rugged terrain at an unprecedented centimeter level resolution, hover over the surface to collect a sample, and bring it all the way home.

The mission was called OSIRIS-REx.

The target was Bennu.

In September 2016, the spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral.

It would take nearly five years to reach the asteroid, map it, collect a sample, and begin the journey back.

The question driving the mission is one that humanity has asked since its inception.

Greg Brenica is a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Greg has spent his career studying meteorites.

rocks from space that have landed on Earth, and the answers they may reveal about the solar system's beginning.

Bennu is roughly as wide as the Empire State Building is tall, a rubble pile held together by its own gravity.

Never melted, never differentiated into a core, a mantle, or a crust, never weathered by Earth's wind, oceans, or atmosphere.

Scientifically pristine.

In October of 2020, the long journey back into Earth's atmosphere began.

Three years through the vacuum.

But before it ever arrived, the mission was entering its next phase, finding someone on Earth who could actually interpret the material.

For decades, telescopes revealed spectra.

Wavelengths of light reflected off asteroid surfaces.

Useful.

Suggestive.