A planetary science professor detailed the first sample return mission involving asteroid Bennu in a book. Dante Lauretta, a Regents Professor of Planetary Science and Cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who also led the OSIRIS-REx mission, shared never-before-heard stories about the fantastic experience.
Dante Lauretta Opened Up About Stopping an 'Armageddon' Moment
Lauretta was candid about the space mission in his book The Asteroid Hunter. According to him, he received a massive amount from NASA to prevent asteroid Bennu, a massive space rock about the height of the Empire State Building, from crashing into our planet.
The huge space rock could hit the Earth on Sept. 24, 2182, with a velocity of Mach 36, or 27,000 miles per hour, and it would be comparable to a "freight train crashing into the planet."
"In 2011, NASA awarded me a billion dollars to accomplish just that. The mission would come to entail not only sending a spacecraft to the asteroid but bringing a piece of it back to Earth," he wrote in the book serialized by Daily Mail. "It is a story four and a half billion years in the making."
On Sept. 11, 1999, a team of researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, entrusted with monitoring the sky for possible dangers from foreign countries and interstellar space, discovered Bennu. Its dark surface indicated a composition rich in carbon, making it a unique kind of asteroid that may reveal a lot of knowledge about the elements necessary for life and the building blocks of a habitable planet, which piqued the scientists' curiosity right away. Others like it may have carried the chemicals that make up our cells' biomolecules, the water we drink, and the air we breathe billions of years ago.
However, the experts were more interested in Bennu because it seriously threatens the planet. If it crashes into Earth, its path will burn through the atmosphere at a brightness many times that of the midday sun.
At the impact, a burst of energy equivalent to 1,450 megatons of TNT will be released. To put that in perspective, 510 megatons of energy are thought to have been used in all nuclear tests conducted throughout history. In a moment, Bennu's crash landing would triple that.
The Earth would overlook such a catastrophe in certain ways because its axis and orbit would continue to function normally. The repercussions would be disastrous in other, possibly more important ways.
The impact of Bennu would leave a crater half a mile deep and four miles broad, resulting in a magnitude 6.7 earthquake.
Asteroid Bennu Sample Return Mission a Success
The sample return mission was successful in September 2023. The parachute carrying the OSIRIS-REx capsule with the Bennu asteroid rock sample safely landed in Utah. The OSIRIS-REx team waited for it and retrieved the sample.
Sara Russell, a professor at the Natural History Museum in London who is deputy lead for mineralogy and petrology on the mission, was among those who witnessed the sample retrieval. According to her, the incident made her emotional, and she was very impressed at how the team successfully brought back the rock from space. They were excited to examine the rock.
"The whole mission has worked like a dream!" she said.
OSIRIS-REx was the first American mission to gather an asteroid sample. Instead of landing, the spacecraft proceeded with its next mission, OSIRIS-APEX, to investigate the asteroid Apophis.
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