NASA’s first collection of asteroid samples, acquired from the depths of space, gently descended into the Utah desert on Sunday, marking the culmination of a seven-year mission.
In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 63,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the mothership set off after another asteroid.
“We have touchdown!” Mission Recovery Operations announced, immediately repeating the news since the landing occurred three minutes early. Officials said the orange-striped parachute opened four times higher than anticipated — around 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) — correctly basing it on the deceleration rate.
Forty minutes later, the recovery team confirmed the capsule was intact and had not been breached.
The sample will be flown Monday morning to a new lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The building already houses the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts more than a half-century ago, AP has reported.
The mission’s lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, will accompany the sample to Texas. The opening of the container in Houston in the next day or two will be “the real moment of truth,” given the uncertainty over the amount inside, he said ahead of the landing.
