UnDisciplined: How do you land on an asteroid?

By Matthew LaPlante

Published April 18, 2024 at 11:39 AM MDT

Three people look at a medium-sized black sample capsule in the desert. — NASA Sample Return Capsule Science Lead Scott Sandford, NASA Astromaterials Curator Francis McCubbin and University of Arizona OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta, collecting data on Sunday, Sept. 24 shortly after the sample capsule landed.

In The Asteroid Hunter, Dante Lauretta chronicles the quest to retrieve a sample from Bennu, which is one of the large asteroids that is most likely to collide with the Earth.

Tags

Matthew LaPlante

Matthew LaPlante has reported on ritual infanticide in Northern Africa, insurgent warfare in the Middle East, the legacy of genocide in Southeast Asia, and gang violence in Central America. But a few years back, something occurred to him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be so brutally depressing all the time. These days, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects with his work on UnDisciplined — Utah Public Radio's weekly program on science and discovery.

See stories by Matthew LaPlante