Media Coverage

University of Arizona Regents Professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, shares stories from his new book, "The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist's Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System."

University of Arizona Regents Professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, shares stories from his new book, "The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist's Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System."

Dante Lauretta, Regents Professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona, discusses the keystone to the entire OSIRIS-REx mission: the space-rock scooper called the Touch and Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism that actually obtained the sample of the asteroid Bennu. He also talks about what might be hiding inside the carbon-rich, ultra-dark asteroid samples, and what near-Earth asteroids keep him up at night.

Scientists shared the first comprehensive science results from NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid-sampling mission at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, revealing the out-of-this-world makeup of asteroid Bennu.

University of Arizona Regents Professor of planetary science Dante Lauretta will speak about the OSIRIS-REx space mission, and his new book about the experience, during two panel discussions March 9 at the Tucson Festival of Books on the University of Arizona campus.

Erika Hamden leads a panel discussion with OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, mission implementation senior system engineer Anjani Polit and AZPM's John Booth, producer of the film "OSIRIS-REx: To Bennu and Back."

NASA recently announced that the University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx mission returned to Earth with 121.6 grams of rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu – more than twice the amount required to declare the mission a success. The final tally came after technicians at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston unstuck two stubborn fasteners and emptied the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, the part of the spacecraft that actually contacted Bennu's surface in 2020, and suffered damage during the reentry process last September.

After seven years in space and over 4 billion miles traveled, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully collected and delivered the first U.S. sample from a near-Earth asteroid. University of Arizona scientists received 200 milligrams of material collected from the asteroid Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and returned to Earth. Initial analyses indicate the samples contain plentiful amounts of water locked up in minerals like clays and are also rich in carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorous.

University of Arizona scientists received 200 milligrams of material collected from the asteroid Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and returned to Earth. Initial analyses indicate the samples contain plentiful amounts of water locked up in minerals like clays and are also rich in carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorous.

University of Arizona scientists received 200 milligrams of material collected from the asteroid Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and returned to Earth. Initial analyses indicate the samples contain plentiful amounts of water locked up in minerals like clays and are also rich in carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous. "We have over a 1,000 particles that are greater than half-a-millimeter, 28 particles that are greater than a centimeter, and the biggest particle is 3.5 centimeters" said the mission's principal investigator, Dante Lauretta, a Regents Professor in the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "We're going to be busy for a long, long time. This is an enormous amount of sample for us."