The University of Arizona Press

Date: Sunday, September 24

Time: 5:55 a.m., MST

Where: Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range (closed to the public) and streaming online

OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and his team travel to Utah  in late September to retrieve the sample of Asteroid Bennu. Watch the action  free via online video from NASA, but you must reserve a spot. Lauretta is co-author of the book Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid, that documents the journey to Bennu and sample collection.

About 20 minutes before the capsule containing the asteroid sample lands, when it is still high above the veil of Earth’s atmosphere, the recovery field team will board four helicopters and head out into the desert. The infrared glow of the capsule’s heat signature will be tracked by thermal instruments until the capsule becomes visible to optical instruments, giving the recovery team a way to trace the capsule’s Earthbound path. The goal for the recovery team is to retrieve the capsule from the ground as quickly as possible to avoid contaminating the sample with Earth’s environment.

About the book:

Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid is the result of a unique collaboration between 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 book 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.

Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. Study of the asteroid is important in safeguarding the future of planet Earth, but Bennu is also a time capsule from the dawn of our Solar System, holding secrets over four-and-a-half billion years old about the origin of life and Earth as a habitable planet.