OSIRIS-REx is the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid. It will deliver an estimated cupful of material from near-Earth asteroid Bennu to Utah’s West Desert on Sept. 24, 2023. After a capsule containing the Bennu samples touches down, its contents will be taken to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and preserved at the OSIRIS-REx Sample Curation Facility.
In June, team members from the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division (ARES) practiced disassembling the OSIRIS-REx sample canister and documenting its contents. Teflon spheres were used to represent material from Bennu – a primitive asteroid thought to contain pristine organics from the early solar system. This page provides editor’s resource reels from the rehearsals.