Right now, still a long, long way from our planet, a little spacecraft is on its way home — and we think it's carrying some samples from an asteroid it visited back in the spring of 2021. We'll find out for sure later this year when it passes by Earth and drops off a capsule — but only if everything goes according to plan.
Special thanks to the voices in this story:
Dante Lauretta, the Principal Investigator in the OSIRIS-REx mission
Katie Cardon, Mechanical Engineering Senior Manager at Lockheed Martin
Kimberly Allums, Curation Projects Lead/Task Order Manager
Melissa Rodriguez, Curation and Astro-materials collections lead for NASA's Johnson Space Center
Moreau, Flight Dynamics System Manager
Richard Witherspoon, Ground Recovery Lead at Lockheed Martin
Kimberly Arcand, Data visualization scientist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
