The mission about to be completed for NASA's OSIRIS Rex
capsule that could give us answers about the origins of
Earth and our solar system.
This morning Osiris Rex speeding back to Earth after a
4.4 billion mile journey through space and just moments ago.
Celebration inside Lockheed Martin's Mission Control in Colorado.
GMA cameras There the moment of Cyrus Rex from the
edge of space 63,000 miles away,
successfully released a capsule with precious cargo on board a
piece of an asteroid 4.5 billion years old.
Missions like this and telescopic observations help us characterize these
kinds of objects.
The capsule is now on the careful journey down to
the Dugway Proving grounds in Utah.
If successful, the mission will conclude.
Seven years of research worth over a billion dollars to
capture samples of the asteroid Bennu,
which scientists hope will help us understand the origins of
life on Earth.
There are about 9 ounces of the asteroid in the
capsule.
We're trying to learn what planets are made of.
Where did the the water and the organic molecules on
the Earth and other planets come from?
And here's here's some samples of that that are going
to come back to the Earth to be studied in
laboratories all over the world for decades.
Studying asteroids is critical for hundreds of scientists around the
world,
in part because of the fear that one could collide
with our planet.
Remember that scene in the hit movie Armageddon?
0 Barriers about to be breached,
NASA scientists predict a slim one in 2700 chance that
the asteroid Bennu,
set to be as big as the Empire State Building,
could strike Earth far, far into the future in the
year 2182.
Now the Osiris Rex spacecraft,
which stayed at the edge of space after releasing the
capsule,
slingshots back into the deep unknown for its next mission,
a sample from another asteroid,
Apophis.
So our space producer Gina Sunseri is inside Mission Control
right now.
She says that slingshot has already happened.
Osiris Rex is now Osiris Apex.
It is heading to a Popice.
It's going to get there in 2029.
So the little spaceship that could we were talking about
exactly doing it.
Love that. Now a Paxton.
Yeah, got.