Seven years is a long time to wait for your carrier service to deliver a package. That’s how long it’s been since NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft set off to gather rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu. But the package has now been safely delivered.
On September 24, the spacecraft flew near Earth and dropped off a capsule containing material collected from Bennu in October 2020 (SN: 10/21/20).
This is the third mission to retrieve bits of an asteroid, and the first for NASA and the United States. The amount of asteroid material onboard this time far exceeds the micrograms that Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft returned in 2005, from the asteroid
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