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The University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx Sample Return Mission won "Civil Space Achievement of the Year" at the 2023 SpaceNews Icon Awards.

University of Arizona aerospace engineering graduate researcher Maanyaa Kapur and materials science and aerospace engineering major Zach Purdie served as NASA interns and members of the sample analysis team on the OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned NASA's first-ever asteroid sample to earth. Their work involved developing experiments to determine the makeup of the material collected from the asteroid Bennu.

University of Arizona aerospace engineering graduate researcher Maanyaa Kapur and materials science and aerospace engineering major Zach Purdie served as NASA interns and members of the sample analysis team on the OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned NASA's first ever asteroid sample to earth. Their work to determine the makeup of the material collected from the asteroid Bennu could come in handy if the space rock ever ends up on a collision course with Earth. "Sometime in the very very far future, they think that Bennu could be on a path to collide with Earth. In a situation like that where you have to shoot an asteroid down, you really want to know the physical and thermal quantities to know how it would even break down," Kapur said.

After NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully collected and delivered the first U.S. sample from a near-Earth asteroid in September, the space agency extended the University of Arizona-led mission so that the spacecraft can study another near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, under the new name OSIRIS-APEX.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History put on public display for the first time a sample from Bennu, the carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid brought back to Earth by the University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx mission. Additional material from Bennu will go on display later this month at the University of Arizona Alfie Norville Gem and Mineral Museum in the historic Pima County Courthouse.

"For the first time we will be able to measure the abundances of all 20 protein-forming amino acids from an asteroid sample untouched by life on Earth," said Sawsan Wehbi, an astrobiologist at the University of Arizona. "My goal is to compare the amino acids we find on Bennu to Earth's early life. I'm hoping to answer this question: 'Did early life use the building blocks that were delivered from outer space?'"

The University of Arizona Alfie Norville Gem and Mineral Museum in the historic Pima County Courthouse will be one of three sites where the public can view samples from Bennu – a carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid – brought back to Earth by the University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx mission.

Members of the OSIRIS-REx science team will be honored during Saturday's football game at Arizona Stadium, a little over a month after they scored a spectacular touchdown of their own.

NASA revealed on Wednesday that "the building blocks of life on Earth" may have been found in an asteroid sample collected from space.

Scientists said they got more material than expected from the OSIRIS-REx mission during its seven-year journey to the asteroid Bennu.