You probably don't remember this from October 2020 because the government was busy trying to suppress Hunter Biden's laptop, but it happened nonetheless:
This week, the samples returned to Earth (cue the beginning of a superhero movie or a horror flick, your choice).
It wasn't that long ago that humanity thought the hot-air balloon was the pinnacle of flight power, so color me impressed.
A capsule containing precious samples from an asteroid landed safely on Earth on Sunday, the culmination of a roughly 4-billion-mile journey over the past seven years.
The asteroid samples were collected by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which flew by Earth early Sunday morning and jettisoned the capsule over a designated landing zone in the Utah desert. The unofficial touchdown time was 8:52 a.m. MT, 3 minutes ahead of the predicted landing time.
Hard to overstate what the whiz kids at NASA were able to do here: Land a tiny spacecraft on a space rock millions upon millions of miles away, dig up some dirt, store it, and then wait for the space rock to get just close enough to Earth for the spacecraft to blast off again, do a near-earth flyby, and spit the samples out — after which the samples were able to successfully re-enter Earth's atmosphere, avoid getting nuked in the atmospheric re-entry, and land undamaged in the middle of a merciless wilderness desert.
Yeah.
The scientists claim the asteroid in question, dubbed "Bennu" (the Egyptian god of creation and the Sun) is "one of the best ways to understand the earliest days of the solar system."
Notably, Bennu itself is "classified as a potentially hazardous object," with an elevated chance of hitting the Earth sometime over the next two or so centuries. It's roughly the size of the Empire State Building, meaning it could do a heck of a lot of damage if it did indeed strike our planet.
[Cue the Bruce Willis film]
The spacecraft had "spent nearly two years circling Bennu" before managing to snatch up its precious samples; after jettisoning the sample capsule, it departed Earth once more to study another nearby asteroid.
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