NASA's Curious Universe - Special Delivery from Outer Space

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

On September 24, 2023, a capsule from space parachuted down into the Utah desert. Tucked inside it were 4.5-billion-year-old bits of rock and dust from a faraway asteroid named Bennu collected by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. These pristine space rocks, which contain carbon and other building blocks of life, could rewrite scientists’ understanding of our solar system. In this episode, sit in mission control and ride aboard helicopters with asteroid mission leaders like Dante Lauretta and Mike Moreau for a behind-the-scenes look at the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission’s epic conclusion. NASA's Curious Universe is an official NASA podcast. Discover more adventures with NASA astronauts, engineers, scientists, and other experts at nasa.gov/curiousuniverse

Dry bag. I got personal bags so far. There it is. Dry bag check. It was a cold morning in the Utah desert long before sunrise on September 24th. Now sampler's last, right? So I'm actually a spare should be at the bottom. Keep going.

Inside a military building buzzing with NASA engineers and scientists, Dante Loretta ran through his checklist one last time, prepping his backpack with field gear. Do you have the filters? Two filters. He'd been up since 1 a.m. He couldn't sleep. Thinking of his spacecraft,

the one he'd worked on for nearly two decades, hurtling towards Earth high above his head. This one? Here, check. This day, the day of the return had been set for years. The end of the nearly 4 billion-mile journey for Osiris Rex.

I'm just trying to do as much now as I can. Yep, make sense. After a nerve-wracking night, it had just successfully released its payload, a capsule full of pristine rock and dust collected from an asteroid in deep space. And now we're just flying through space. It's amazing to think of that capsule,

just really out, especially because I saw it when it was first to settle and tested. The precious sample was on its way to Earth, but Dante couldn't relax. yet. In just a few short hours, that capsule would either come gently parachuting down on this military test range, or come careening down for a hard landing on the desert floor, as he watched helplessly from the recovery helicopter. The culmination of Dante's life's work, it would all come down to one moment. This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is a wild and

wonderful place. I'm your host, Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. Dante Loretta is a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, and he's also the principal investigator for Osiris Rex, NASA's first asteroid sample return mission. You might remember him from our 2020 episode, Asteroid hunting, recorded just before the Osiris Rex spacecraft successfully collected its sample from the surface of asteroid Benu. Three years later, he was still at it, waiting in Utah, to finally welcome that sample home. So Dante was the reason we were all out in the middle of the Utah desert in September. Dozens of NASA scientists and engineers and communicators all there to make sure everything went perfectly.

That's Christian Elliott, Curious Universe producer. To get the inside scoop on the sample return, we sent him out to Utah. He'll be taking it from here. Dante was very busy on the day of the sample return, the grand finale of Osiris Rex's seven-year flight. But as the sample capsule was hurtling down towards Earth, he took a few minutes to sit down with me and talk about how he was feeling before heading out into the desert. So you're going to be one of the people on a helicopter going out there. Yeah, I really wanted to be one of the first people to greet the Benu samples to the Earth.

So I volunteered to be on the environmental sampling team. It's an understatement to say that this was a big day for him. He led the mission every step of the way. It feels like I've been here from the beginning of time, but my journey on Osiris Rex goes back to February of 2004, so almost 20 years. From the rocket launch in 2016. Three, two, one, lift off of Osiris Rex. It's seven-year mission to bold,

go to the asteroid Benu and back. To the rendezvous with Benu in 2018. A two-year survey of the asteroid and successful sample collection in 2020. All stations, this is OREX systems on OREX cord. I copy all subsystems or go for tag. To months of dress rehearsals and practices to today, the sample return. Yeah, it's a really interesting emotional. It's a little bittersweet because it's been my life for so long.

There's definitely an element of anxiety coupled with the excitement because there's some critical operations that still need to happen. The main thing that still needed to happen that Sunday morning was the parachute. That's what makes the difference between a gentle landing and a crash. It had been in storage on the spacecraft for the last seven years, and Dante and his fellow scientists were nervous that it wouldn't work after that. that it wouldn't work after all that time. And for me, that's the moment I'm looking forward to the most,

getting confirmation, the parachute is open, because then I know we're home at that point. It's going to come down and we're going to go out there and get it. We spend a lot of time talking and thinking through all the things that might go wrong, and that is just mentally exhausting. Back in 2004, when Dante was starting to dream up Osiris Rex, a different NASA mission returning solar wind particles crashed into the desert at Dugway.

The same Utah military test range where I was talking with Dante now. Its parachute didn't deploy. So we've been studying that, watching that video, and planning on what we would do in the event that we have a similar kind of failure. The good news is we learned from that, and we are not going to repeat that mistake, but still, there's always things that can go wrong. Space flight is nerve-wracking,

and you just make sure you do everything you possibly can to make it succeed. And I know we've done that. Dante wouldn't be able to relax until he saw the capsule's parachute deploy. But he was still able to reflect a bit on how well the mission had gone so far and what the future might hold. We're really excited because we've done a very thorough job

surveying the surface of asteroid Benu. And I've seen rocks on that asteroid that don't look like anything we've seen in our meteorite collections. So I'm hopeful and optimistic that we're bringing back. something new. I really want to see those samples and start to unravel the secrets of our solar system. Thanks for taking for time. You bet.

NASA has a lot of meteorites in its collection. But those space rocks aren't anything like the ones inside the Osiris Rex capsule. When meteorites crash land on Earth, they get exposed to and contaminated by our atmosphere and biosphere, even if scientists get to them within minutes, after they land. These rocks from Benu are pristine. They've never been anywhere other than the vacuum of space for the last four and a half billion years. They're so old, scientists hope they'll help us understand

how our solar system formed, and even how life first began on Earth. This is NASA's first attempt to collect an asteroid sample in outer space and bring it safely back to Earth. For Dante, that's an effort worth dedicating your life to, no matter how it turns out. So this is Christian Elliott, NASA audio producer, out here in the middle of the desert in Utah. We had our hour and a half drive-in like we do every morning. Saw some wildlife coyote and some pronghorns just alongside the road.

Because we're really driving through just about 90s. nothing on the way out. There's some flowers and desert plants and the Great Salt Lake out to your right and the mountains in the distance lit up by the sunrise. So it's just after five in the morning at Dougway Proving Ground. I'm over at Building 1010. It's the Mission Operations Center. We just heard that the Osiris Rex spacecraft has released the capsule.

So in just under four hours it'll be coming down into the center. to the Utah Desert in the Department of Defense's Utah test and training range. After Dante finished packing his gear, all eyes turned to the two leaders of the recovery team, Mike Moreau from NASA and Richard Witherspoon from Lockheed Martin, the NASA partner that built the Osiris Rec spacecraft. The room was full of scientists and engineers, and each one of them had spent years waiting for this moment. For a mission like this one,

it takes a village. At a big moment like this, what do you say? Richard went first. All right, welcome to the final briefing. Zero days until SRC return. Technically, sub-120 minutes until it's going to be on the ground.

All right, here's our current status. We released the SRC from the space. Focused on the technical, he brought everybody up to speed. The sample return capsules' batteries had come online successfully. which was a good sign because the battery is what sets the timed reentry system aboard the capsule into action, which ultimately concludes in parachute deployment.

Then Mike took over to give a pep talk. A lot of people don't realize Osir Shrek's is probably one of the most challenging planetary missions, deep space exploration missions NASA has ever done. In my role of 10 years on this project, I've seen many examples of just being successful. so proud to be a part of a team that could overcome any obstacle. If it gets choked up, even just thinking about it. So you guys have been preparing so hard for today, and today is here, we're ready to do this.

This is a huge endeavor. It's something that our whole country and the whole world is watching. And you guys get to do it. Okay. O-Rex on three. Ready? One, two, three. O-Rex!

With that, the field team left 1010. If everything went perfectly, they'd be welcoming the capsule back home at last, in just under two hours. The vehicle's in 10 minutes. So are you guys double-checking gear? We double-checked our gear, it's loaded up in the van, we're ready to get over to the helicopters. Feeling good? Feeling good. Been a good morning.

Yeah. Wait and watch the sun come up. Yeah, watching the sunrise. Exciting morning, but everything went right on schedule. Batteries came online, that's the one I was waiting for the most. That felt good. So everything you want to see after? Just that parachute, that's the last thing for the flight system to work.

Then it's atmospheric. O-Rex has done its job. Better hurry up, we're going to be late. Just kidding, I'm kidding. Paps will still be there. Babsel still be there. You could hear it in Dante's voice. It came up in interviews with every scientist I talked to

in the days leading up to the sample return. The parachute just had to work. If it didn't deploy, this day, the last 20 years of hundreds of engineers and researchers' lives and science experiments on asteroid rocks for generations to come would have augured into the desert soil. So Dante Loretta and the other members of the St. Paul Recovery team just took off from Building 1010, Mission Operations Center,

after a bit of a pep talk from Mike Moreau and Richard Witherspoon. And they're headed on over to the Michael Army Airfield hangar where they're about to board helicopters and head out to Wake Mountain to wait for the sample to land. So things are happening. It's just a gorgeous morning. The sun just came up a few minutes ago. It's a little after 7.30,

and the mountains behind the base are just a beautiful color of red. What a beautiful morning, 40, too. The landing sequence may have had the scientists full attention, but it wasn't the only part of the mission NASA was worried about. Teams at different locations and vantage points were focused on every detail, from helicopter maintenance to weather conditions, and prepared for any outcome. The day before the sample returned, I had a chance

to check out the helicopters the mission was relying on. They would be responsible for dropping the field teams off in the desert and hauling the precious cargo back to building 1012 as quickly as possible. I watched the field team load the Heald helicopters with a custom cradle to carry the capsule, and shovels to dig it out of the mud if necessary, since it had rained a few days ago. I spoke to one of the pilots about some of their concerns.

Yeah, out there on the range, it's fairly flat, but there are some sand dunes, and we're really hoping the capsule stays in the center of the ellipse. We'll be fine then. Gotcha. Either way, we'll come back with it. We checked conditions today, and unfortunately it did get a lot of rain in the last few days. So it is pretty mud. But if we have some wind and this warm temperature is going to help today dry it out,

and we're hoping it lands in one of the drier areas, and that will help tremendously. But you can see on these skids. Yeah, I see the mud. Yeah, the mud's super sticky, and we sink in about an inch and a half, two edges right now. We sat down next to the helicopter to take a look at the hook and cable called a long line, which would be used to haul the capsule back to the clean room from wherever it landed. So his door will be off, and then they'll hook up a long line, a hundred-foot synthetic cable or long line.

They'll hook them up to the capsule, and they'll have it all covered, and they'll have the netting and everything on it. He'll gently pick it up, fly it in, then he'll gently lower it, And once it's on the ground and settled, then he hits a button and releases the remote hook on the end of the line. He picks up and he comes over to MAF with the long line and hook on. And we'll sit down over here and job's done. Yep, some precious cargo. On the big day, at Building 1010, a few minutes after Dante and his team had left in the vans,

we watched those helicopters head off for Whig Mountain, the staging area 12 miles away. NASA video producer Liz Wilk was out there on the windy mountain top, keeping an eye out for us. The team is staged out at Wig and ready to go for helicopter operations to recover the sample. A few hours ago, four hours ago to be precise the team. Hi, my name is Liz. I'm a video producer for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Right now I'm at what is called the Wig. It is a area or a little facility on top of Wig Mountain here on Doug Way.

It looks out towards where the ellipses, where the Osiris Rex sample will be landing. It is a giant salt flat. When you look out towards it, it is very, very, very large. And there are mountains surrounding the area, and just the mountains are so, so far away. The area is so large, the mountains are so far away that they just barely pop out against the sky. The landing ellipse Liz is talking about is a huge 37-mile long flat oval where the team hopes the capsule will land. That might sound like a big area, and it is. But it's not easy to hit a target that size from millions of miles away in space.

Seems like almost as soon as the sun came up, everything just got chaotic. The helicopters are here with Dante Loretta. Meanwhile, with Dante gone to wig, I went to a week. into the mission operations room, the nerve center for the mission. Richard, Mike, and the rest of the Recovery Command Team all sat around a big table covered with papers and laptops. They were watching this big wall of monitors, waiting to spot the capsule coming down through the atmosphere.

Across the range, NASA and military spotters watched two from surveillance airplanes and ground radar stations. Great, every command is stood up. It's a great day to collect sample return capsule in your Utah. Go Cyrus Rex. EDRX. SRC has entered the Earth's atmosphere. As the sample return capsule hit the atmosphere,

going faster than the speed of sound, there was tension in that room for sure. You can see in WB. It was the moment of truth. They were all crossing their fingers. crossing their fingers that this mission wouldn't end like 2004, with a capsule of astromaterial crashing into the desert floor. SRC is experiencing maximum speed and maximum deceleration.

But then we could see that the parachutes had deployed. There is a great. Here we go! All stations, we have visual on the SRC under the main shooting. We watched from mission operations as the surveillance plane cameras tracked the bright orange parachute through the blue sky. Then we lost sight of it, as the capsule disappeared behind a hill. We couldn't tell if it was safe. Oh, and it is touchdown.

The visual confirmation of touchdown, however, it gave one behind a hill. Mike and the other engineers and scientists were on the edge of their seats again. It took several minutes for the helicopters to fly across the huge ellipse. Recovery operations, he was one and two are in the area of the landing site. But once they did, they could see the capsule sitting there with the parachute on the ground next to it, right next to a service road on a dry, flat patch of ground, just as the team had hoped. It was a perfect, gentle landing. Finally, everyone relaxed a bit.

From this point on the SRC has been located. From this point on, it was all up to the recovery team. They had to make sure the area was safe, clear of any unexploded ordinance, since this is a military test facility. Oscar's performing the unexploded ordinance survey. And that the capsule hadn't been breached during re-entry. SRC is dry. T-Shield is nose down. There are no indication without a configuration.

Moving to a forward position. Copy all. Do we have confirmation that the SRC is being? that the SRC is not breached. SRC is not breached. Thank you. Once they determined it was safe, Dante's team started collecting environmental samples

around the capsule that would be used later to make sure the asteroid sample hadn't been contaminated. Yeah. Looks good, huh? Yeah. Parachute right next to it. Man, we did it. Did it?

Did it? Yeah. Beginning to install these and others. Remember, the moment the capsule entered Earth's atmosphere, the risk of contamination had been there. That beautiful baby. And until it got to the safety of a clean room, a special lab designed to keep the sample safe, that risk was only increasing.

So their work was a race against time. It looks nominal, no sign of sample. So I'm going to stay away from that with the pink flag. Back in mission operations on the big displays, I watched Dante and his team methodically go through the steps. Okay, pink flags have been placed. Crawling around on hands and knees, collecting soil samples and little baggies.

I think we might want to collect a few samples from in there. Ready? And planting flags, taking photographs, collecting air samples and canisters. I photograph sample in the bag. This is a lot nicer right. Then the field recovery team from Lockheed Martin wrapped the capsule with netting

and hooked it to the helicopter as they'd planned, while Dante's team finished up the environmental sampling. Now, Dante and the field team's work was officially done. It was time to hand things off to the clean room curation team scientists. A clean room is exactly what it sounds like. It's a special kind of lab where the air is filtered and scientists wear special garments to keep all sorts of contaminants away from whatever they're working on. The asteroid sample would eventually make its way to NASA's Johnson Space Center,

where engineers had built a specially designed top-of-the-line clean room just to house and study it safely for decades to come. But before it could be shipped there, scientists here in Utah would have to partially disassemble the capsule to get the sample canister inside out. So they had to set up a temporary clean room here at Dougway, a sort of military field hospital for the sample built inside a hangar. In other words, before they could bring the capsule to the clean room, they had to bring a clean room to the capsule.

It's pretty unusual to build a clean room out in the middle of nowhere in the desert. So while we were waiting for the capsule to arrive by helicopter, the curation team talked with me about their setup. We basically are going to take the canister into progressively more clean spaces, starting with the temporary clean room here in Utah, and then at Johnson Space Center bringing it into an even cleaner clean room. That's Nicole Lunning, lead sample curator for Osiris Rex. I found her standing outside 1012,

watching for the helicopters with Aaron Regberg, another curator and the Quality Assurance Representative from Johnson. He's responsible for making sure everything, about keeping the sample safe, goes just right. He had his head deep in a thick manual, pages blowing in the breeze. So I'm glad they did. It's like a lengthy procedure book. It's pretty long, but it's got a lot of white space.

So it's easy to sort of check things off. And it does take us all the way into the clean revetian. Yes, yeah, gotcha. And there's a bunch of spacecraft stuff that has already happened. Yeah. Yeah, we're already on page 20. 29. Aaron led the way down a long hallway into the hangar.

But they needed, they were going to do one last set of particle counts this morning, make sure that everything is working the way we expected to. But it's as clean as you need it to be? It is cleaner than we needed to be. While we walked, Aaron explained why this temporary clean room was so important. Yeah, so the asteroid out in space has known. never been exposed to oxygen. So we're trying to get the bulk of the sample under an inert gas as fast as possible.

We're going to use nitrogen for that. So we're essentially trying to keep the sample from rusting. Even though the spacecraft has traveled through billions of miles of treacherous outer space to arrive here on Earth, the last few thousand miles from here in Utah to the Johnson Space Center in Texas were equally critical. the stakes were high. There's a number of disassembly steps that have to happen before we can actually get to the sample canister

that has the port on it where we can start flowing nitrogen through it. Pretty well inside the... Yeah, yeah, so there's the heat shield, and then there's a back shell, and there's some other things that have to come off before we get to the sample canister itself. Until the capsule is open, and the nitrogen purge is attached in this clean room,

the rocks are at risk. my jobs. So Julia and I, that's Julia, over there, are going to be stationed by the big garage door with brushes and trowels and we're going to sweep as much of the dirt off of the canister, the capsule before it goes into the clean room as we can. Right. Inside the sort of drab, beige hanger beyond the garage door was this huge, shiny white cube structure with big air ducts and wires coming off of it. Inside you could see a metal table waiting for the capsule.

Yeah, so what we're looking at is sort of a temporary room that we built inside this hangar-like space. And the walls are all made out of vinyl, and there's some plastic windows, and then the floor is made out of aluminum plate. And the way this works is there's a big bank of HEPA filters in the ceiling, and so we have a big air handler that pulls in air from the hangar and pushes it, through those HEPA filters to clean it and then that air comes down from the ceiling and goes out as exhausted through a set of vents on the right-hand side of the room. So the idea is any particles that do make it through those filters should be

swept down to the floor and out the side of the clean room. Gotcha. We're also all wearing clean room jumpsuits or we call them bunny suits. So that's a set of coveralls and shoe covers and then on your head you You wear a hairnet and a mask, and that's to protect the samples from us, not us from the samples. And then over that you wear a hood, and those are made out of polyester, those suits. And then you also wear gloves, of course. So we're really trying to keep the people from interacting with the sample as much as possible.

Though their work in the desert was complete, the job's not done for these curation team scientists. They'll follow the sample to Johnson, where their work opening the canister, documenting how much sample they have, and studying it, will begin at last. And this is just the beginning for... This is just the beginning for us, yeah. We've got several months worth of work ahead of us. Cool. Well, thanks for taking me over here.

Yeah, you're coming. Then I had to get out of there. I wasn't clean enough for the hangar housing the clean room once the sample came in. And just in time. I stood in the crowd of scientists and engineers and communicators on the runway behind some safety barriers and watched, holding my hat on against the rotor wash, as the helicopter hovered over us and lowered the capsule gently to the ground. It was wild just knowing that we were a few feet away from 4.5 billion-year-old rocks.

Special delivery from outer space. Standing next to Jason Dworkin, the Mission Project Scientist, who's also been on the team since 2004. And how long have you been on the Cyrus Works Program? Since before was a project, so 19 years. Wow. So how does it feel to be walking up to it right now? Exilarating. It's been a long time, long wait.

And for me, I'm a sample scientist, so my time to do the science is just about to begin. and it's really 19 years of waiting for it to be here and now. Here we are. While the curation team got to work out of view in the clean room, I hitched a ride back to the Michael Army Airfield with Mike Moreau. Seems like just another reversal, huh? To welcome the field team back, just as their helicopters were landing there. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for letting me be in the room there. Curious universe, right? Yes, Curious universe. Copy command, Oscar 2, runs out. Go ahead. This is recovery command. Copy recovery command. Show UO4 and down to MAPA and the time.

Probably, 15 mics. Copy that, 15 mics. That was the helicopter carrying Dante Loretta and the field sampling team back to the airfield. Helicopter 4 is on its way back to Maff in, what did I say? 15. 15 minutes, ETA. In the car next to me,

Mike had to remind himself that what we just saw was real, not just another practice run. It had gone so perfectly that it was easy to forget. Richard and I were talking about the fact that it's kind of surreal seems like just another rehearsal. So you kind of have to stop yourself and think about the fact that that was really the capsule that's been, that we launched seven years ago, that we worked so hard on. Yeah. It gives me chills when you say it like that. So we just drove back to the MAF hangar from the Avery complex. It's derived with Mike Moreau.

And now the place is really hopping. The VIP tent is full. Helicopter, helicopter is on its way back, hopefully landing here in a few minutes. We hope Dante Loretta, our PI, would be able to step in and say a few remarks from the field. So please stick around for that. Then Dante landed and walked off the helicopter across the runway and right onto the stage. Watching him hop off that helicopter, you could tell a weight that had been there for many years had lifted off his shoulders. So thank you to everybody. The team has done an enormous job.

This is what happens when you practice, practice, practice, practice. Everything goes perfectly. couldn't be more proud of this mission. I'm probably like a baby in that helicopter when he told me that parishes had been spotted. I thought it was the end of a long, long day. Dante had never intended to lead a space mission. He planned to spend his career as a lab scientist.

But he stepped in as leader of the Osiris Rex mission after his advisor and mentor died unexpectedly in 2011. Now that privilege and burden was at an end. The spacecraft, now called Osiris Apex, will fly onto another asteroid called Apophis, with a new leader, one of Dante's students. And he'll get to go back to his roots, studying rocks in the lab. The best times are ahead of us, I always feel that way, we're going to get in that canister, we're going to feel that tag sam, we're going to see those samples of bending, and we're

going to rewrite the history of the solar system. And Osiris Rex isn't the end for Dante Loretta either. He won't say too much, but like any good scientist, he's already looking for where to go next. Yeah, I mean, sample return missions are the future. They're the gift that keeps on giving. You get answers you could never get from spacecraft-based instruments. I've been involved in a concept for comet sample return, so that's the one I'm most excited about. The next day, the sample canister of precious materials from Benu boarded a C-17 cargo plane,

and flew to its new home at NASA's Johnson Space Center. At the new Astro Materials Lab at Johnson, the asteroid sample joined the largest collection of extraterrestrial materials in the world, dating back to the Apollo missions. In the new clean room built to house it, scientists began the delicate process of retrieving the sample, revealing their early results to the public.

So, you're ready to see the results of the mission? They found an abundance of asteroid material, not only in the container, but also coding it. Every grain has the potential to reveal new secrets of the solar system. These pristine rocks will provide a whole new context for all the meteorites already in NASA's collection and help scientists understand how our solar system formed, and whether asteroids like Benu delivered some of the organic materials necessary to see the beginning of life on Earth. So the first analysis shows samples that contain abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals,

and they contain carbon, carbon being the central element of life. Portions of the Osiris Rex sample will be loaned to scientists in small quantities over the coming months and years. About 70% of the sample will be preserved unopened for decades so that generations to come can study them, using technologies not yet invented, to answer questions we haven't yet thought to ask. Everything is a new discovery as we are glimpsing the early part of the development of this magnificent thing called the universe. Plus, lessons learned from keeping these Benu rocks pristine will usher in a new era of astro-material science, as NASA plans to bring back samples from the moon, Mars, and beyond. This is NASA's Curious Universe.

This episode was written and produced by Christian Elliott. Our executive producer is Katie Konans. The Curious Universe team includes Jacob Pinter, Maddie Olson, and Michaela Sosby. Christopher Kim is our show artist. Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santiguida of System Sounds. Special thanks to Rachel Barry, Keegan Barber, Liz Wilk, Arlene Elis, Liz Landau, and the entire Osiris Rex team. At NASA, the University of Arizona, Lockheed Martin, and our military partners for giving us behind-the-scenes access to the sample return in Utah. If you enjoyed this episode of NASA's Curious Universe, the best way to show your support is by leaving us a review and sharing the show with a friend.

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