The planetary science professor described the first sample return mission involving asteroid Bennu in the book. Dante Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona Lunar Planetary Laboratory who also led the OSIRIS-REx mission, shared previously unheard stories about this fantastic experience.

Dante Lauretta talked about stopping “Armageddon”

Lauretta was candid about space missions in her book Asteroid Hunter. According to him, he received a large sum of money from NASA to prevent the asteroid Bennu, a huge space rock the height of the Empire State Building, from falling on our planet.

A massive space rock could hit Earth on September 24, 2182, at Mach 36, or 27,000 miles per hour; this can be compared to “a freight train crashing into the planet.”

“In 2011, NASA gave me a billion dollars to achieve just that. This mission involved not only sending the spacecraft to the asteroid, but also sending some of it back to Earth,” he wrote in a book published by the Daily Mail.

On September 11, 1999, a group of researchers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, tasked with monitoring the skies for possible threats from other countries and interstellar space, discovered Bennu. Its dark surface indicates a carbon-rich composition, making it a unique type of asteroid that could reveal a wealth of information about the elements necessary for life and the building blocks of a habitable planet, drawing immediate interest from scientists. People like him may have carried the chemicals that make up the biomolecules in our cells, the water we drink, and the air we breathe billions of years ago.

But experts were more interested in Bennu, as it seriously threatened the planet. If it hits Earth, its path will burn through the atmosphere with a brightness many times greater than the brightness of the noon sun.

During the impact, an energy equivalent to 1450 megatons of TNT will be released. To put this in perspective, it is estimated that 510 megatons of energy have been used in all nuclear tests throughout history. Bennu’s sudden crash landing would triple that figure.

The Earth would remain somewhat unaware of such a catastrophe as its axis and orbit would continue to operate normally. The consequences would be disastrous in other, perhaps more important, ways. Bennu’s impact would have left a crater half a mile deep and four miles wide and resulted in a magnitude 6.7 earthquake.

Successful return mission of asteroid Bennu sample

The sample return mission was successful in September 2023. The OSIRIS-REx capsule carrying a rock sample from asteroid Bennu landed safely in Utah. The OSIRIS-REx team expected this and took the sample.

Sarah Russell, a professor at the Natural History Museum in London and the mission’s deputy head of mineralogy and petrology, was among those who witnessed the sample being taken. She said she was touched by the incident and was impressed by how the team successfully brought the rock back from space. They were very happy when they saw the rock.

“The whole mission was like a dream!” said.

OSIRIS-REx was the first American mission to collect asteroid samples. Instead of landing, the spacecraft continued on its next mission, OSIRIS-APEX, to investigate the asteroid Apophis.