How to watch NASA reveal the Bennu asteroid sample

By Trevor Mogg Published October 8, 2023

NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV

NASA is set to reveal the sample collected from the Bennu asteroid during the OSIRIS-REx mission.

Recommended Videos

The space agency will livestream the event on Wednesday. See below for full details on how to watch.

The OSIRIS-REx mission marked NASA’s first-ever sample retrieval from a distant asteroid in a complex operation that involved landing a spacecraft on the rock, grabbing and storing materials from it, and then bringing them all the way to Earth.

The mission launched in September 2016, with the spacecraft collecting the sample four years later. Its long journey back to Earth ended last month when it dropped off the sample in a capsule that landed in the Utah desert, exactly as planned.

After being held for a short while in a clean room near the landing site, the capsule was transported to the Johnson Space Center in Houston where it will be opened, allowing the start of years of scientific study that researchers hope will tell us more about the formation of our solar system and even offer insight into how life on Earth began.

Commenting on the successful mission, NASA chief Bill Nelson said OSIRIS-REx has “brought something extraordinary: the largest asteroid sample ever received on Earth.”

Nelson added: “It’s going to help scientists investigate planet formation, it’s going to improve our understanding of asteroids that could possibly impact the Earth, and it’ll deepen our understanding of the origin of our solar system and its formation.

The NASA boss said the mission proved that “NASA does big things — things that inspire us, things that unite us, things that show that nothing is beyond our reach.”

Scientists are currently performing an initial analysis of the sample that should offer a basic understanding of the Bennu material. Analytical instruments being deployed include a scanning electron microscope (SEM), infrared measurements, and x-ray diffraction (XRD), to gain a better understanding of the sample.

How to watch

NASA will reveal the sample gathered from the Bennu asteroid at a special event starting at 11 a.m. ET on Wednesday, October 11.

You can watch it via the video player embedded at the top of this page, or by visiting NASA TV, which will carry the same feed.

Topics

Tech News

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Space

Building blocks of life identified in sample collected from asteroid Bennu

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft descending towards asteroid Bennu to collect a sample of the asteroid’s surface.

Scientists studying the sample collected in 2023 from asteroid Bennu have announced a dramatic finding: they have identified the key building blocks of life within the sample. Although this does not mean that life is present on Bennu, a small asteroid in our solar system, it does show that the conditions for life to emerge are present in locations beyond Earth.

Researchers have been studying the 121-gram sample since it was dropped into the Utah desert by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission in September 2023. Now, in a pair of two papers published in the journals Nature and in Nature Astronomy, scientists announced they have identified 14 of the 20 amino acids that life on Earth uses to make proteins within the sample. Additionally, the sample also shows evidence that saltwater was once present on the asteroid, which would have provided a medium for these compounds to interact.

Space

NASA has two ideas for how to get samples back from Mars

An illustration of NASA's Sample Return Lander shows it tossing a rocket in the air like a toy from the surface of Mars.

NASA has big goals for Mars. It wants to collect the first-ever samples from the Martian surface and deliver them back to Earth in an ambitious mission called Mars Sample Return. But even in its development phase, the mission has run into problems. With a ballooning budget and unrealistic time frame, NASA decided last year that it needed a new approach to the mission, and now it has announced an update. It's working on two ideas, with the best to be chosen in 2026.

“Pursuing two potential paths forward will ensure that NASA is able to bring these samples back from Mars with significant cost and schedule saving compared to the previous plan,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “These samples have the potential to change the way we understand Mars, our universe, and – ultimately – ourselves. I’d like to thank the team at NASA and the strategic review team, led by Dr. Maria Zuber, for their work.”

Space

Watch NASA’s SLS rocket take one small step toward the Artemis II moon mission

The core stage of NASA's SLS rocket.

Artemis II Core Stage Moves to High Bay 2

Although it won’t be blasting off until mid-2026 at the earliest, preparations are already well underway for the launch of NASA’s highly anticipated Artemis II mission.

nproxy.org