Today’s news / Osiris-Rex lands safely
NASA employees approaching the space capsule that landed in a desert area in Utah on Sunday afternoon Danish time. Scientists hope that the contents of the space capsule can provide answers to some of the fundamental questions about how our solar system originated. Photo: Handout NASA/Ritzau Scanpix

Osiris-Rex lands safely

An American space capsule landed in the desert in Utah on Sunday afternoon Danish time carrying the largest asteroid samples ever collected. Scientists have great expectations for the samples that the Osiris-Rex spacecraft brings home to Earth, possibly giving them a better understanding of how our solar system formed and how the Earth became habitable. “This collection of samples is really historic. This is the largest sample we have retrieved since Apollo’s moonstone,” says NASA scientist Amy Simon. The samples will “open a time capsule to the beginning of our solar system”, writes the U.S. space agency NASA on X. Osiris-Rex was launched in 2016, after which it landed on the asteroid Bennu. Here, it collected about 250 grams of dust and pebbles from the asteroid’s rocky surface. /ritzau/AFP/