Welcome everyone!
About OSIRIS-REx
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, will return to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, with material from asteroid Bennu. When it arrives, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will release the sample capsule for a safe landing in the Utah desert. The pristine material from Bennu – rocks and dust collected from the asteroid’s surface in 2020 – will offer generations of scientists a window into the time when the Sun and planets were forming about 4.5 billion years ago. NASA’s live coverage of the OSIRIS-REx sample capsule landing starts at 10 a.m. EDT (8 a.m. MDT).
Webcasts:
- Official 4k NASA broadcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdwyqctp908
- The Launch Pad (countdown clock): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sos8lTVmtNo
Other resources:
Please feel free to post updates and questions in the comments!
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Touchdown!
Parachute deploy!
The Launch Pad are live with a countdown clock. The NASA webcast is scheduled to start in just over nine hours from now.
I’m excited for this to be very normal and exactly as expected.
End-of-day update:
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx clean room team has finished disassembling the sample capsule and packaging its components, including the unopened sample canister. Now packed in shipping containers – along with the environmental samples the recovery team collected around the capsule’s landing site this morning – the items are scheduled to be delivered on Monday, Sept. 25, to their permanent home at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Sample return capsule has been wheeled into the clean room. Next step is to carefully extract the sample canister from the capsule.
Helicopter is now transporting the capsule to the clean room.
