Watch Live: To cheers, NASA asteroid sample capsule safely touches down in Utah

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/24/ [login to see] /watch-live-nasa-sends-an-asteroid-sample-back-to-earth
After traveling billions of miles for seven years to touch an asteroid and bring a sample home, NASA's Osiris-REx mission has finally delivered a precious sample to Earth.

The sample canister successfully touched down around 10:52 a.m. Eastern in a Utah desert after a nail-biting descent through the atmosphere.

The canister had begun its solo journey earlier Sunday morning after being released by the Osiris-REx spacecraft as it passed within 63,000 miles of the planet's surface.

In the capsule should be roughly a coffee mug's worth of rock and other material collected from the asteroid Bennu, which at the time was more than 200 million miles away.

If found to be intact, that single serving of space rock will mark the biggest haul of extraterrestrial material brought back by any nation on Earth since the Apollo astronauts carried pieces of the moon home, and the culmination of NASA's first attempt to bring samples of an asteroid back to Earth.