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.