After traveling billions of miles for seven years to touch an asteroid and bring a sample home, NASA's Osiris-REx mission has finally delivered a precious sample to Earth.
Mission members cheered and clapped as they learned the sample canister had successfully touched down around 10:52 a.m. Eastern in a Utah desert after a nail-biting descent through the atmosphere.
Workers tracked the capsule as it parachuted down toward its landing zone, performed a safety assessment and then whisked it off, suspended under a helicopter, to a laboratory clean room.
In the capsule should be roughly a coffee mug's worth of rock and other material collected from the asteroid Bennu, which at the time was more than 200 million miles away.
Mission members cheered and clapped as they learned the sample canister had successfully touched down around 10:52 a.m. Eastern in a Utah desert after a nail-biting descent through the atmosphere.
Workers tracked the capsule as it parachuted down toward its landing zone, performed a safety assessment and then whisked it off, suspended under a helicopter, to a laboratory clean room.
In the capsule should be roughly a coffee mug's worth of rock and other material collected from the asteroid Bennu, which at the time was more than 200 million miles away.
