September’s arrival of dust and gravel from the asteroid Bennu is just the latest in a series of space missions that will bring back bits of other worlds. They should reveal more about our galaxy; they might show whether we are alone in space.
In Australia we are into the small hours of Monday, but it is still Sunday morning in Utah: 24 September 2023. At 8:52AM, the return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission lands alone but safe in a Department of Defense Training Range near Salt Lake City. A team of helicopter-borne engineers is on the spot in minutes, and by 11AM the capsule is encased within a nitrogen-equipped clean room.
No people are aboard, but the capsule contains a hermetically-sealed container in which
