NASA asteroid sample lands safely in Utah before being whisked away by helicopter

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
"Scientists are exulting over the safe arrival of a canister containing about a cup's worth of asteroid rocks, collected 200 million miles away, that landed in a Utah desert after a 7-year NASA mission sent to retrieve them.

The black pebbles and dirt are older than Earth, and are undisturbed remnants of the solar system's early days of planet formation. As part of an asteroid named Bennu, these rocks traveled unsullied through space for eons.

While bits of asteroids regularly fall to our planet as meteorites, scientists want to study pristine asteroid material, stuff that's uncontaminated by our planet, to understand the early chemistry that might have contributed to the emergence of life.

That's why scientists immediately whisked the returned capsule into a nearby clean room and put it under a cloak of nitrogen gas to protect it from the Earth's atmosphere as it's transported to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston."...