Media Coverage

University of Arizona and NASA researchers report interesting discoveries from the material recovered from the asteroid Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx mission. Professor of planetary sciences Tom Zega discusses the key findings so far.

NASA's Johnson Space Center curation team members this month successfully removed the two fasteners on the OSIRIS-REx sample return container that previously prevented them from accessing the remainder of the material the University of Arizona-led mission obtained from the asteroid Bennu.

A NASA mission to collect samples from an asteroid older than Earth could change our understanding of the solar system. Pierre Haenecour, a cosmochemist at the University of Arizona, is interviewed.

NASA's Johnson Space Center curation team members have successfully removed the two fasteners from the sampler head that had prevented the remainder of OSIRIS-REx's asteroid Bennu sample material from being accessed.

At University of Arizona, celestial inquiry generates hundreds of research-funded jobs and a Super Bowl's worth of economic enterprise.

The scientific community got its first description of material from asteroid Bennu, revealed by the mission's top scientist, Dante Lauretta, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Lauretta, a planetary scientist and a University of Arizona Regents Professor, showed slides with a long list of intriguing molecules, including carbon-based organics, in the grains and pebbles retrieved from Bennu. They will shine light on the molecular building blocks of the solar system and "maybe — still early phase — maybe insights into the origin of life."

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.