The University of Arizona Press
June 26, 2023
Arizona Public Media’s “The Buzz” interviewed Dante Lauretta about what to expect when OSIRIS-REx returns to earth. Lauretta is co-author of the forthcoming book, Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid. In the interview, Lauretta explained: “We’ve got to do multiple things. First of all, we got to get ready to receive that capsule. . . . Of course, the sample has to get to Houston, to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. So we’ve been doing a lot of work building the curation lab, making sure it’s ultra clean, getting all the hardware in place, and reviewing the procedure for disassembling the flight hardware. Then for me, the best part is the real science. This is a sample return mission. Our goal is to analyze that material and we’re going after the whole history of the solar system.”
On “Houston We Have A Podcast,” Gary Jordan interviewed the OSRIS-REx mission’s deputy project manager, Mike Moreau, and the mission’s lead curator, Nicole Lunning. Lunning detailed the sample protection process for when the capsule carrying the Bennu asteroid sample lands in the Utah desert on September 24, 2023: “We’ll collect the sample as quickly as possible and actually connect it basically to a nitrogen bottle here in Utah to maintain that nitrogen atmosphere, and keep it from having any of the contact with Earth’s atmosphere that just always happens to meteorites no matter how rapidly you collect them.”
About Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid:
The world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.
The print edition includes 120 illustrations, 50 maps, and 80 stereoscopic images
