NASA effort to bring home asteroid rocks will end this weekend in triumph or a crash
If all goes as planned, on Sunday morning a bell-shaped space capsule the size of a mini-fridge will come screaming down through the atmosphere toward a Utah desert.
Inside will be some precious cargo: about a cup's worth of rock and dust that a NASA spacecraft collected from an asteroid called Bennu that was, at the time, more than 200 million miles away.
This will be the biggest amount of extraterrestrial material to be brought back to Earth by any nation since the Apollo astronauts hauled home moon rocks, and it's the culmination of NASA's first mission to bring home samples of an asteroid.
The 4.5-billion-year-old pebbles inside the return capsule are thought to be pristine leftovers from the early days of the solar system, when the planets were first forming.
Scientists want to study these rocks to learn more about the chemistry that ultimately led to the emergence of life on Earth — assuming the capsule parachutes down unscathed and its contents
