There's been nothing like Osiris-rex in NASA's repertoire.
I like to call it the Daredevil spacecraft.
10 seconds.
Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three,
two. One.
And liftoff of OSIRIS-REx.
Its seven year mission to boldly go.
To the asteroid.
Bennu and back.
Hello and welcome.
I'm Karen Fox with NASA's Office of Communications.
And we are here today at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah
for a press briefing on NASA's Osiris-rex mission.
Earlier today, the mission jettisoned the capsule containing samples
from asteroid Bennu that parachuted down onto the Utah Test
and Training range so we can study those samples here on Earth.
It's been a very big day, and we're gonna kick it off with some highlights.
And. Gear while still
SRC is experiencing maximum heating and maximum deceleration.
So you just heard right
they were experiencing that 5000 degree Fahrenheit maximum heating EDL miles.
So we have in terms of parachute deployment. Wow.
And after an exhilarating
streak across Earth's atmosphere, we have parachute deployment.
You can see just a sigh of relief from the team.
I can hear some applause here.
The team over at WB 57
Touchdown
I repeat, EDL
SRC has touchdown.
And touchdown of the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule
a journey of a billion miles to asteroid BENNU and back has come to an end
marking America's first sample return mission of its kind
and opening a time capsule to our ancient solar system.
A sample carrying fixture.
Of the operations WB has located the parachute on the ground.
You just heard that confirmation
from that high altitude plane locating that parachute on him.
We have here a panel will all give you some of their impressions
and some information about what happened today.
And then we will go on
to take some questions from media in the room and on the phone line.
We have with us, Lori Glaze, who is the director for NASA's
planetary science division at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.
We have Dante Lauretta, who is the Osiris-rex
principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Next, we have Mike Moreau, who is the deputy project manager
for the Mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
And Tim Priser, the chief engineer for Deep Space
exploration at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado.
And finally, Eileen Stansbery, who is the chief scientist at NASA's
Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Lori passing it to you. Great. Thanks, Karen.
I don't even know what to say.
What an incredible day this has been.
It has just been phenomenal from start to finish.
I wanted to start just by thanking everyone that's been here,
sharing this with us here at the Dugway Proving Ground and everyone
around the world who has watched and followed along all day.
It has just been amazing.
We just appreciate everyone coming along with us to celebrate NASA's
first ever asteroid sample return.
It has been incredible.
And these samples that we've brought back and now you're going to hear
what the next steps are.
And you know what we're going to do with those samples.
Those are going to be a treasure for scientific analysis for years
and years and years to come to our kids
and our grandkids and people that haven't even been born yet.
It's going to be absolutely incredible.
And another thing I just want to point out is that, you know,
this these types of samples, they are they are truly the gifts that keep on giving.
They are a treasure.
And this mission, Osiris-rex, is kicking off a decade
of sample return following Osiris-rex.
NASA's partnering with the Japanese Space Agency on the Mars Moon Explorer mission,
which is going to bring samples back from the Mars Moon Phobos.
We're going to have
new Artemus samples of the moon
feed, incredible new scientific analysis and new understanding
of our closest neighbor, the moon, and then capped off
with the return of samples from Mars, samples that are currently
being collected by the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars.
So this is just an amazing an amazing opportunity here to to kick that off.
I did want to make sure I take this opportunity to thank
those that that made this possible.
What you saw today, everything that you saw
could not have happened without the amazing partnership
between NASA and Department of Defense, including Hill Air Force Base,
Dugway Proving Ground and the Utah Test and Training Range.
And then also I'll even add Air Force.
He's brought the aircraft here that's going to carry our
our precious samples and some of our team members down to Houston tomorrow.
It's just been amazing.
And I'll also just say what you saw executed today, that precision,
everything going just almost perfectly to plan.
That happens because of an incredible
team and hundreds and hundreds of people.
You'll hear from a few of those team members here.
But I know that every person that you see is backed by hundreds of others.
It's been an incredible accomplishment.
And I just want to thank Dante
and everyone, the entire team, for this incredible accomplishment.
And then the last thing I'm just going to close out with
is just a reminder that, you know, the spacecraft osiris-rex
dropped off her precious sample this morning
and then 20 minutes later embarked on a new journey.
She's not only embarking on a new journey, but handed over to new leadership, now
led scientific leadership by Daniella DellaGiustina
Fantastic to see the next generation taking on this next generation mission,
taking the spacecraft to explore another asteroid called Apophis.
So thank you. Back to you, Karen.
Thank you so much, Laurie.
Next up, we have Dante Lauretta, who's going to tell us
a little bit about what it was like to be part of the recovery team.
Thank you, Karen.
Well, today capped the end of an almost 20 year adventure for me.
I got involved in this program in February of 2004
when representatives from Lockheed Martin came to Tucson and said they were
thinking up an asteroid sample return mission
and they wanted U of A to take the scientific leadership role.
And I was brought in as the deputy principal investigator
under the leadership of my mentor, Professor Mike Drake.
And I just want to think about Mike a little bit here today.
He passed away in 2011, just four short months
after we won the contract from NASA to fly this program.
And I know he would be super proud and he would have loved today.
He would have just really embraced and embarked on this amazing journey.
When we first were talking to
to our friends at Lockheed, it seemed like Magic Mike.
They said, Pick an asteroid, Dante,
and we'll bring samples back to the Earth for you to study in your laboratory.
And I can tell you this is the end of a very long spell.
Right. We've been casting it for a long time.
And it was great to be part of the recovery team.
It was pulse pounding, I'm sure, for you watching it even more
for those of us in the helicopters waiting for that main shoot to come out.
Right.
We were with bated breath, making sure that we came down
for a a nice soft landing in the Utah desert.
And it worked.
And it worked spectacularly well.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people to lay eyes on the capsule.
And boy, did we stick that landing.
It was just sitting right there, you know, a few tens of feet right off
a nice road, perfect place for the helicopters to land.
Didn't move. It didn't roll, didn't bounce.
It just made tiny little division in the Utah soil.
So for the environmental sampling team, that was great.
We had to sample the area right where the capsule landed.
We picked up some background
sample soils just for understanding the native environment.
The dust samples and gas samples to see if anything was coming out of the capsule.
We don't think so because the safety engineers
were the first ones on the scene.
We actually couldn't approach it until they cleared it for human safety reasons.
There was no sign of any any toxic gases, which we knew was a rare event.
But of course, human safety always comes first.
And that was the first check out that needed to be made.
It was also a very clear area.
We are in a military test range.
There was no sign of any issues for us to operate out there.
So we got our job done really fast.
You know, we did a lot of rehearsals.
We always rehearsed and practice on this team.
That's why we always achieve these high levels of excellence.
And I can't say I'm I couldn't be more proud.
And just to remind you,
not only did we bring this mission in on schedule under budget
and delivered more science than we had even thought was possible
with the encounter with Bennu, but we think we've got a lot of sample
in that in that science canister and we can't wait to crack into it.
For me, the real science is just beginning.
I grew up as a laboratory chemist studying meteorites and particles
from the Stardust Mission, which NASA brought back in 2006.
So I really am looking forward to the next stages of this journey.
People have asked about, you know, planetary protection.
We did go through extensive planetary protection reviews.
We were unrestricted Earth return because Bennu was a near-Earth asteroid,
probably material from this asteroid has been delivered to the earth
at some point in the past.
It's also a very small body that's constantly exposed to ionizing radiation.
And no lifeforms that we know of would be able to survive that kind of environment.
So very, very low risk.
In fact, we're more worried about Earth biology contaminating the sample.
The key objective for me and one of the driving objectives
of this program is to try to understand how did carbon rich asteroids like Bennu
deliver the compounds that may have led to the origin of life
on our planet, the origin of Earth, as a habitable world.
And so we don't want biological organisms interacting with this,
so we plan to exclude it from any contact with bacteria
or anything else that might compromise our scientific investigation.
And the team at Johnson Space Center are experts at this.
They've got a beautiful laboratory and isolation glove boxes.
And we're going
to start processing that sample, we hope, as early as Tuesday of next week.
Great.
Thank you so much, Dante.
Next up, we have Mike Moreau, who's going to tell us a little bit
more about entry, descent and landing.
Yeah, So it's so amazing to be in this moment.
It's hard to describe what it means to be in this moment.
I've worked on this project not as long as Dante, but but a decade
through the early development of the mission
to the mission operations to leading the recovery team.
I was in the control center today with my partner in crime,
Richard Weatherspoon, from Lockheed Martin,
and we were directing the efforts of the team and directed all the planning
that went into that activity today and just seeing that parachute
and seeing the capsule descending on the main parachute
and then seeing it just sitting perfectly on the desert floor.
Just hard to articulate what that means
after so, so much put into this mission.
But I want to talk a little bit about what we saw in the operations room today.
It started with the amazing job that our teammates out in Denver
did, the Lockheed Martin and Kinetics Aerospace and Goddard, people
that were there operating the mission and targeting that Earth entry interface.
So precisely so that we could come down.
That's magic in my opinion.
And I'm a navigator,
but the precision with which they do that job is just incredible.
And that's what got us to the start of today.
Now get to our partners at the Air Force.
One of the great things about landing in this facility is the tracking
cameras and radars that are around this facility
with very first signal that we had that we were on track
was from our Air Force counterparts when they said we had radar lock
before we even reached the radar.
The atmospheric interface.
So just a few moments before.
But that was a great moment because the capsule was released
from the spacecraft 4 hours before, coasted
from a third of the distance to the moon to that point in the atmosphere.
And that signal from the radar said that we were on track within a few seconds
of where we needed to be.
So that was a huge moment.
Then we had aircraft, one of them
operated by the Johnson Space Center, WB57 aircraft.
It had infrared and optical cameras on it very soon after the radar detection,
we started seeing signals from the WB 57
and we were able to see the actual hypersonic reentry and the fireball
and then track the capsule as it descended.
And until the parachutes came out and landed on the ground.
And you all saw that footage on the television as far as the landing goes.
We landed a little bit to the east of our nominal landing point,
but that's what our amazing entry, descent and landing engineers have been
telling us is going to be happening.
They've been looking at the atmospheric density in the models for that.
The trajectory path we would take through the atmosphere
and they predicted
we would be east of our nominal landing location, and that's where we landed.
So I just want to say
that I'm so proud to be part of this team that did this today.
I'm proud to be part of the team
that got us here in part of the mission operations.
We had some great challenges to overcome with this mission
and great groups overcome great challenges.
And it's been a pleasure
to work with some of these amazing teams in my ten years working on this mission.
Thank you so much, Mike.
Our next speaker is Tim Priser with Lockheed
Martin to talk a little bit about the capsule itself.
You know, this capsule
literally has a personality in it.
It understood the assignment.
And I think back
I think your colleague, Peter Smith and I got to work on Mars, Phenix
and that that little lander understood the assignment, too,
that the scientists come up with these grand questions
that they're striving to get answers for.
And we as engineers,
for goodness sakes, it's the best job an engineer
could ever have to help a scientist go gather this knowledge.
It's just so thrilling and rewarding
and so much so that we we understand the question
and then we can design a special spacecraft,
Like OSIRIS, to go collect the information and the answers.
And like Phoenix, like I said, I think she understood the assignment, too,
because Peter Smith wanted to prove that there was water ice on Mars.
And bless her heart, just before she touched down, she used the thrusters
to blow all the regolith off and say, Look, there it is.
There's your eyes. Peter.
Well, today, Osiris Rex not only 4 hours before entry
did she understand the assignment
and put this SRC on a path to hit an entry interface
that needed to be so precise that you didn't slip out of the atmosphere
or you hit it too deep and you burned up before you had a chance to get
to the ground.
So she did that
flawlessly with aplomb, and then she immediately turned her
attention on Apophis and changed her name on the back of her jersey.
And she's now OSIRIS-Apex.
By the way, we scored the first touchdown today
before any of the other NFL teams that I just want to put that on the record.
But back to the SRC.
She came through the atmosphere.
She knew her job was to get to the ground.
She also thought it would be nice and kind to land close to a road,
you know, heat shield down back, shell up
basically with a little sign that said Dante,
please hug me.
It. And it was so she made it so easy for us
that these designs are are so robust
that as she's coming through the atmosphere, you know,
whether or not the atmosphere was more dense than it should have been
or expected to be or, you know, some something in our sequence
may or may not have behaved itself exactly the way we expected it to.
But the subsequent things in the sequence made up for the fact
that parachute came out and we touched down as soft as a dove.
It was just beautiful.
And you can see the excitement not only on the scientists team,
but when they showed that
the mission support area back in Littleton and the celebration in that room,
that that's when it becomes real, because the thousands of hours
that all of these people spent over the decade or more.
Right. Years together,
they just naturally build relationships that lasts last a lifetime.
They watch each other's children grow up over that time of a timeframe.
And so their children were
excited to family and friends.
We're back there and it's just a special, special occasion.
And in this case, when we land on Mars,
we don't have a lot of opportunity to go collect the parachute,
put it in a bag and analyze it, grab the avionics
so we can go troubleshoot and or understand how well they behaved.
We have our hands on the heat shield and the back show,
and we can prove that our our prediction, our models
either were spot on or we need to adjust them.
EDL reconstruction is a real thing.
Every one of us, whether it's Mars or Earth,
that's the first thing.
As an engineer that we want to do.
We want to collect the data,
collect the hardware if we can, which we can in this case,
and understand how well our models are going to predict
the next one.
I can watch this video from today over and over and over.
It was just a beautiful thing.
Thank you so much, Tim.
Our final panelist is Eileen Stansbery, who is going to talk a little bit
about what happens to the samples after they were recovered of.
Thank you very much.
These samples are an amazing
treasure trove for generations,
but we currently have a team of spacecraft engineers,
scientists and curatorial personnel
working right now in a temporary clean room here at Dugway
to make the sample capsule ready for transport down to the Johnson
Space Center so that we can open it up and reveal this treasure.
The the entry into the
clean room has been
has gone extremely well.
They're processing the capsule,
removing portions of the canister
so that they can get a continuous flow of nitrogen
into the sample canister or to ensure
that there is no contamination from Earth's atmosphere into that canister
and maintain the pristineity of the these samples
so that the science team,
200 plus people
all over the world can start studying these samples.
Once these samples are taken to the Johnson Space Center,
we'll be able to start
removing them, denigrating the the science canister,
evaluating those samples
and providing them to the scientific community.
I think that there's a quick video here
of taking that's
the the capsule into the clean room
and being able to see fit
and make sure that we retain a uncontaminated sample
as the stewards of the scientific integrity of these staples.
The curatorial team at the Johnson Space Center is working hand in glove
with the spacecraft engineering team and the science team
to ensure that we are processing and handling this
sample return capsule
in a measured, methodical,
well-choreographed sequence.
And I'm happy to report
that the sample canister
was put on purge today a little bit before 1:00.
And so we now have a a continuous flow of nitrogen
within that science canister,
and we are well on the way to
getting that science canister ready for transport
down to the Johnson Space Center.
And the the the support that we are providing
to the science and engineering teams
today is documenting the handling,
ensuring that we understood and the
the environment that the science canister
is in and
making way for
the next generation of understanding
a new world.
Thank you so much for those in the room,
Do you know that those videos were showing up on the broadcast?
If there are any more
some of these TV screens in the back, you can turn around and try and see them.
But for now, we are moving the questions.
We are going to take a few in the room and then we will also go to the phone line.
If you are on the phone, you can press star one to get in the queue
and we do have a microphone.
So if I call on you, please wait for the mic. Alex Let's see
the answer right here.
Hi, Alex.
With the nature for Dr.
Stansberry, is there anything. Else you can say about sort of the condition
of the capsule on the.
Exterior, what it looks like when you open it up, Anything about
patterns of wear, not erosion, but just more about the physical condition
as you were going through it? Um,
when they took the back show off,
it was extremely clean on the inside.
It was remarkably similar to
prior to launch.
Makes you wonder, did we actually open it up at some point?
But I know we opened it up.
I saw it in Tagsam and,
and it was beautiful, clean
and extraordinary
experience of seeing that
this the spacecraft itself must have
worked extraordinarily well,
that all of the the engineering that went in to ensure
that the science canister was going to remain clean, did their job.
All right.
Another question in the room.
This gentleman in the green shirt here, please do identify yourself
and you have a mike coming over your shoulder here.
Thanks very much.
It's Ivan Semeniuk with the Globe and Mail in in Canada.
I just want to follow up on what Tim Priser said about how maybe
some things didn't go quite as expected, but then other things compensated.
It all worked out.
What were those things that didn't go as expected?
And can you give us a sense of what some of the surprises may have been?
I can tell you what we expected to happen.
If you remember, the peak G is about 32 G’s sensed.
on the way up that Paul said at a 3 G level, we actually armed some triggers
to start the sequence of events.
We experienced the peak 32 G pulse and then we passed back through that three
G trigger on the way back down and that initiates the sequence of events.
11 seconds
later, the drogue chute is is commanded to deploy.
And then 360 seconds after the drogue, the main chute deploys.
What I can tell you, because we all saw it, the main chute did deploy.
It was difficult to see in in maybe
with our EDL reconstruction in the data that we still need to go collect,
we can understand some of the upper atmosphere
in the hypersonic flight regime.
But at the end of the day,
when that main chute deployed, it
basically corrected any of the sins that may have happened
ahead of it because, you know, it was beautiful as on time.
We hung under the chute for five and a half minutes, just like we expected
and just like I said, touched down like a feather.
I'd just like to clarify that.
I mean.
Possibly the drogue chute did not deploy or is it not clear yet? Yes.
So we don't know if the drogue shoot deployed
because we don't know if we can see that in the imagery.
The imagery that we saw was not positive.
But we do know is that the main parachute came out.
It came out a little bit earlier than we expected.
But that time difference
was within the family of variation that we expect from the atmosphere.
So so that is not really a surprise to us.
You know, Tim is talking about analyzing all the data.
One of the great things about landing here is we have all this photo documentation
from four different camera systems that were around.
We also have the WB imagery.
We don't have that available yet.
We have not been able to look at that.
I can tell you that I could not see whether or not the drogue was deployed
in the imagery that I could had available in real time in the ops room.
That's not necessarily an indication that it did not deploy,
but I can't confirm that I saw it in imagery.
But what we're going to do is what we always do
is go back and look at this in great detail.
And that's one of the advantages of landing here, is we got a ton of data
and we're going to go back and look at that
and we'll reconstruct exactly what happened.
But the bottom line is we landed that when the main parachutes came out.
That was the moment that I was waiting for.
And and that for me was success.
I knew that we had done we were were successful.
And we were going to get that sample today.
And that the simple fact of the matter is the drogue
parachute deploys the main parachute.
So just by the way, that is designed,
the drogue
did deploy
the drogue is on top of the main parachute.
So all had to come out.
So that that's where I say the robustness
of this design, you kind of rolled itself up
into a ball and said, I'm going to get this done, and I got it done.
Thank you so much.
We're now going to go
to two questions on the phone and then I will come back to the room.
Our first question on the phone is from Jeff Foust with Space News.
And good afternoon.
Question for Mike Moreau.
You mentioned that the landing site was a little bit east of the center.
How far off from the center was the landing?
And was that entirely do the atmospheric variations or anything
that might have happened with the parachute timing
that caused the, uh, that caused that thing?
Um, I'll talk a little bit about this because it's
really part of the amazing work that the team did.
Our ellipse, our final ellipse that we were looking at
today was something on the order of 12 by 30 kilometers.
It's not exactly, but that's approximate.
So that's a lot smaller than the planning ellipse we'd have,
because as we got closer and closer, things have shrunk down.
Where we landed was probably eight kilometers or so to the east.
I don't have the exact number, but it was on the eastern side of that ellipse.
But our EDL team had been telling us for the last week or so they expected us
to land to the East Side Ellipse and that was based on
looking at the actual forecasted atmospheric density
and wind speeds and things would take us to the east.
So we were really I was really excited.
I sent them a little screenshot of where I thought the landing was
As soon as it was there, because I was like, Wow, you guys were great.
You told me exactly where it was going to land and that's where it ended up, so...
I think you may have won the pool, by the way.
All right, Thank you very much.
The next question from the phone line is from Bill Harwood
with CBS News.
Hey, thank you very much and congratulations, everyone.
Two quick questions.
One for Tim, just making sure I understand what you were just telling us.
Are you saying the drogue definitely deployed, but
you don't know if it inflated or you just didn't see it visually?
And for Dante, I'm just wondering what went through your mind
the moment you heard
that the main chute had deployed or maybe you saw that with your own eyes.
I mean, that must have been
an amazing moment for you after all the years you put into this.
Thanks. You go first.
All right.
Yeah, but we were in the helicopter waiting,
and so all we got was telemetry from our range control officer here at UTTR.
So I didn't have all the cool video and things like that
everybody else was seeing here.
So I was really trying to hear through helicopter noise
and we heard passing through 100,000 feet, passing through 60,000 feet.
And I was getting a little worried for sure.
I knew things were supposed to be happening
on a nominal timeline, that I wasn't getting call outs.
But again, we could just have radio dropouts there.
And then we heard main chute detected, and I literally broke into tears.
I mean, and I probably can do it right now just thinking about it, because
that was the moment I knew we made it home.
And, you know, I'm weary at this point.
I've been thinking about this and focusing on it, and all of my energy
and all my will has gone into making this thing a success.
And I knew the moment the chute opened, that was it.
We knew what to do. From that point forward.
There was no surprises left, and it was overwhelming relief, gratitude,
pride, awe, and really trying to convince myself
that I wasn't dreaming that it was actually happening,
that the chute was open,
that the capsule was coming down, that we got that science treasure in hand
and it's the end of a journey and the beginning of a new one,
because we're going into the atomic realm, we're going into the mineralogy,
the chemistry of the organics and the history of the solar system,
which is what I signed up for all those years ago,
is to do the laboratory investigation on this material.
So I'm getting really excited about getting into the lab and really digging
into these samples and answering all the questions that have come up
before we launch and especially from our encounter with Asteroid BENNU.
A lot of surprises there.
A lot of new science ideas came out of that,
and that's driving our sample analysis plan right now.
And Mike.
About the drogue.
And relatively the parachute deploy that we the clarity of the videos
that we do have and have had a chance to look at, especially the high speed one
coincidentally, is very clear at about the time that parachute deployed.
And we can see the drogue chute, pull it, deploy it.
So we know that drogue chute was out and it deployed the main chute
at that point in time.
What we need to do is continue to comb through the information, the data,
the video that we do have, just to see if we can understand how much time
ahead of that point we can confirm or or not
whether or not that drogue was out.
Thank you so much.
We have two people who have had their hands up for a while,
this gentleman here, and then we'll go to the gentleman right behind him.
And please identify yourselves. Yes,
Thank you.
And congratulations, Chris Cokinos with Astronomy Magazine.
The two part question for you, Dante.
One scientific and one personal.
Is there anything that you can tell from
how the sample return canister was behaving?
I guess you would say as you were moving it
or the nitrogen flow that might tell you anything about the status of the sample
inside you had mentioned before, it might be just highly pulverized.
Is there any any sense
of that at this point or you just have to wait until you open it
and then, like you said, you were weary when, when and
where do you get a chance to just like, I don't know, take a hike in the desert.
Go, go in the Tucson.
When do you get a chance to just, like, take a breath and reflect
and kind of rejuvenate a little bit, thinking.
So I we don't have any information about the nature of the returning sample
at this point.
This capsule weighs 50 kilograms.
We think we have 250 grams of sample inside there.
So you really wouldn't be able to tell anything
and they wouldn't let me shake it like a kid in Christmas
trying to see what I can hear inside there yet.
So and they probably won't let me do that, right. I mean
so I have to be patient and I'm and I'm really exercising patience.
I understand we need to go methodically, systematically through the hardware.
We have a very well defined procedure.
The curation team knows the importance of getting sample out to the science
as quickly as possible while maintaining the integrity of the collection.
And I'm fully on board with that.
Osiris-rex is about the science, but it's also about the legacy.
And the legacy is that long term collection.
And we work hand in hand together as science and curation
to make sure that both of those are achieved in a timely manner.
In terms of when I get to relax, that's a good question.
We've got a busy week ahead of us.
We're flying to Houston tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, so not tomorrow.
And then Tuesday morning we hope we get that canister open
and I expect we'll see some dust and we have a plan to sample that dust
and get into the science instruments at JSC right away, just to say,
did we bring back what we thought or is it something completely different?
And knowing Bennu, it might be a little both, right?
So I can't wait to see that
I have a big party planned on October 14th in downtown Tucson.
The whole city is celebrating with us.
Mayor Romero of Tucson declared
today Osiris-rex day, by the way, Thank you, Mayor Romero, for that. And
so I think October 14th,
we should have pretty good idea of what the nature of the collection is.
We should be at the final stages of allocating the first major masses
to the science team.
And yeah, we're going to throw down.
Fantastic this don't know it a little bit closer here.
This gentleman right here.
Thank you. Please identify yourself.
Thank you.
David Brown, The New Yorker.
Dante congratulated to you and the team for an extraordinary achievement today.
Dr. Glaze,
I have a question about how a government shutdown
might affect OSIRIS-Apex and
Whether any of the sample.
That was collected today might get out to laboratories before things go wrong.
Now, these are these are great question.
It's certainly something that's on the top of many people's minds
at this point as we near the end of the fiscal year.
And so I'll address the first question first about Apex.
As in the past,
when there is a government shutdown, we've been through this many times before.
All of our operating missions get accepted.
We know that they are
incredibly valuable assets and so we generally get an exception
for that to protect protect property, which they are.
And so Apex will continue operations as as normal.
As far as the samples,
we are committed to this process
that Dante mentioned and ensuring that those samples
are kept secure and safe for posterity.
And so we will assure that they're safe.
There may be some delay, a little bit of delay in the science analysis
as we as soon as they're they're safe, we will,
you know, make sure that we step back and do this where we're told to do,
but we will assure that they're safe.
Fantastic.
We didn't take one more from the floor.
And I'm sorry there are so many people, but I believe right there in the back,
they have their hand up for a while and then we will switch back
to the phone lines before coming.
Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us.
My name is Spencer. I'm with Fox 13 here in Utah.
Welcome to Utah.
Glad you liked it here. And glad Cyrus.
Liked it here as well.
My question is for anyone who wants to answer it, and I believe someone.
Mentioned the Osiris Apex mission.
Kind of handing that to the next generation.
How important is. It for. Things like.
This to inspire even the generation after that to get involved in.
STEM and.
Get involved in wanting to explore outer space?
I'll start off by saying, Yeah. So
I think Osiris-rex is an excellent
example of the inspirational value of these kinds of activities.
The reason why we should be investing our taxpayer dollars
in these missions of exploration, of course, the science is fantastic.
The engineering is beyond amazing, but the inspirational value
is really where the long term payoff comes from these.
I started out as a young, naive assistant professor in 2004
when my mentor Mike Drake, believed in me, brought me in as his deputy,
and together we worked for seven years to come up with a mission concept
that was credible
and that the agency felt like they could invest in with
with the right amount of scientific return.
And I know Mike would be incredibly proud of that, and it was a key
part of his vision from day one that this is about the future generations.
And Danny DellaGiustina, who's now the PI of the Cyrus Apex,
I officially congratulated her right when the SRC released from the spacecraft.
My PI ship follows the capsule and she takes the spacecraft
on to the next adventure.
She started with us in 2004, as well as a freshman
at the University of Arizona when she enrolled in my asteroids seminar
and she led a student experiment design
for a discovery version of what we called Osiris.
Back then, she was going to be the student experiment lead.
She left for a little while to go pursue her advanced degrees, but came back
as the image science imaging scientist and now is the Deputy PI for OSIRIS-Rex.
She'll continue in that role
through the sample analysis phase and also as the principal investigator
for OSIRIS-Apex.
And she is strongly committed
to bringing the future generations along with her on that team.
And and we've got five and a half years to Apophis
and then 18 months at that amazing target.
And you're going to see a lot of young people involved in that mission.
And I can just tell you, I love working with kids.
I go out in the community quite a lot.
Boys and Girls Clubs of Tucson, Local Tucson schools.
We're hosting a great event at the Tucson Children's Museum right now
to have the city celebrate this activity.
And I also teach undergraduate and graduate students.
And so many of them said, We are here because of Osiris-rex.
We came to Tucson because the Osiris-rex mission was based here,
and it was just an amazing example of what people can do.
When we put aside our differences, we focus on a common goal.
We can achieve great.
This country can achieve great things, but we have to work together
to make that happen.
I'd like to add that if I could.
So I think that's a wonderful question,
and a big part of why we do these missions is inspiring the next generation.
And I'm a perfect example of that.
I grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont.
I was inspired by the Voyager missions,
by some of the early space shuttle missions.
You know, it was that that got me interested in math and science.
And then it was NASA Research
that helped to fund my graduate studies and brought me to working from a farm
in Vermont to doing a job at the Goddard Space Flight Center,
where I met an amazing mentor, Gerry Soffen
So that is just one of the biggest reasons why we do these missions.
We're talking all about the science.
But in order for our nation to be competitive in the future,
we need young people to want to study math and science and technical fields.
And this is just one aspect of that.
But it's an amazing, rewarding aspect to work on some of these great challenges,
and it's kind of teamwork that Dante talked about.
So thank you for that. Question.
Thank you so much.
Going back to the phone lines, we are going to take a question
from Marcia Dunne with the Associated Press.
Not hearing you yet, Marcia,
and it's
great.
Well, I am going to go on to the next person, though.
I think Marcia might be on there twice, So we might need to go to her
other phone line and see if that one works.
For now, though, we are going to go to Robin Andrews
with popular Mechanics.
Hi. Yeah,
I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that the council
has an explosive ordinance expert to check for any unexploded munitions.
So does that mean that was a very small but non-zero chance that the capsule,
after its odyssey, could have softly touched down with an unexploded munition
and been blown to bits or was that just just
the extra extras like.
Well, I'll take that because I've been the primary person
working with our colleagues at the Air Force here who've just been amazing hosts.
And I'll just say that the Utah Test and Training Range is an amazing place
to land a sample.
It's very flat, it's free of hazards
and they have these amazing tracking resources here, but it is a test range.
And so they do all kinds of stuff here and safety is our number one priority.
So this is a big place.
The first thing that the Air Force does when they send their personnel
out in the range is make sure there's no unexploded ordnance.
We add unexploded ordnance, check on our capsule
when it arrived in the clean room, that was the first thing we did.
So this is just kind of a standard procedure of safety first.
And that's what we did out there today.
Great.
I will try Marcia Dunn, one more time.
Now that we've seemed to have pulled a second line from her.
So Marsha Dunn with the Associated Press, let's see if this one works.
Hi, Can you hear me?
Can you hear.
I'm going to ask my question.
Hello?
I'm wondering if the capsule was dented, dinged, bent at all.
It touched down.
And any idea what this final touch down speed was?
And Dante,
how overwhelming was it
when you finally got your eyes on the capsule and got up close to it?
Thanks. Sir.
Well, being one of the first people
that got to get out there and see the capsule, it looked great.
I mean, it was charred, but it came in at 27,000 miles an hour.
So we expected that. Otherwise, it looked perfect.
There was no sign of any damage or
distortion to the heat shield or the back shell that we could see.
There was a little bit of char left in the tiny little crater
that it made literally like about this big across.
So it was pretty much we stuck the landing and that's what
Rex has done consistently.
So I wasn't too surprised, but it was like seeing an old friend
that you hadn't seen for a long time, and it was great to see it.
It was just great to see it.
I did want to give it a hug, but, you know, I knew I'd be all city
and we were trying to collect environmental samples,
so that really wouldn't have gone over well.
But yeah, it was amazing.
I was there when it was encapsulated in the fairing.
I was there when it was assembled and it was installed on the spacecraft.
I was there when it was nothing but a PowerPoint on a slide in
and a proposal that we were submitting that asset
with the stream that we were going to bring back samples from Bennu
So it was amazing and emotional.
I've been emotional all day, and that was one of the key
moments for me, was seeing that I knew we had done it,
that we had pulled it off.
As incredible as it seemed all those years ago, it came to be
great.
Thank you for coming back to the room here.
Please, uh, brighten the front.
Thank you.
Jonathan Amos, BBC News.
Can I just go back to Eileen?
When you took the the the heat shield off and the on the back show,
was there any evidence that you might have had some spillage of sample
being on those surfaces when the tagsam was put away?
I mean, it was leaking, right?
So I'm just I'm just wondering if there are little specks,
little particles on those surfaces
that need to be picked up.
That's part of the procedure is
to methodically go through and investigate that.
Our our purpose here in support of the science and engineering
teams is specifically to document
and recover anything that could be loose.
The I have not seen the
aeroshell portion
taken off, but when I was over there in the clean room
back Shell was was removed and there wasn't anything
optically visible
from the exterior of the clean room.
My team is working in the clean room
in concert with the Lockheed Martin
engineers and the science team,
ensuring that we document and and recover
anything that could have spilled out.
But at the time I saw it,
there was no evidence that they're
still working in the clean room this afternoon.
So there is still a possibility
that there could be some of those samples.
They will be documented and recovered
and put into containers to be brought to the Johnson Space Center, just like
the science canister, to make them available to the scientific community.
That's part of the process.
We're not yet through that process.
Great.
Thank you so much.
Again, one more from the floor.
Also in the front row
here, this this woman on the aisle
with the microphone is coming around.
It's great because it can
in the front row on the aisle here.
Thank you.
Howdy.
Alyssa McGraw at Texas A&M University.
Sounds like the range of grain sizes may not be known in.
The canister yet, but could somebody.
Speculate on how this could enhance thermal.
Inertia or a modeling of asteroid surfaces?
I'll take that.
That's one of the key scientific objectives
for our sample analysis program is to characterize the thermal properties.
When we were at the asteroid and when we were even before that,
through our telescopic astronomical campaign, we had tracking
data on this asteroid back to 1999 all the way through departure in 2021.
So a fantastic baseline.
And we did see thermal effects,
the Yarkovsky effect, which I know you're an expert in
causing a decrease in the
orbital velocity and therefore the sun a major axis of the asteroid.
So absolutely, we have Dr.
Andy Ryan at the University of Arizona
who leads the physical and thermal analysis Working Group.
We have partners in Japan, partners in Canada,
as well as some special laboratory equipment
that we've designed right at the University of Arizona
to measure thermal conductivity, thermal skin depth and
bulk density, and other key parameters that will feed into understanding
the thermal inertia,
allowing us to do an even better job of constraining the energy balance
in the regolith of the asteroid, which is one of the top science objectives.
It's called out in our level one requirement to do that actually.
So yeah, the big part of our program and feeds
into the planetary defense initiatives because these kinds of parameters
really influence future trajectories of these objects.
So if you want to have an accurate prediction of where
they're going to be in the future, you can't just rely on Newton's laws
or even Einstein.
You still have to go to the thermal properties
and yarkovsky to really get a complete solution.
Great.
Thank you so much.
We are going back to the phone lines.
Our next call is from Nell Greenfieldboyce
with National Public Radio.
Hey, thanks for taking my question.
This is for Dante.
So the first thing you guys might be able to look at is just, you know, on the.
Outside.
Of the canister or the sample container.
I mean, the the collecting devices inside the canister.
Like what?
What tests will be done on the dust and what will you be able.
To tell from it?
Like, what will be the first thing you learn
that we should know in the next few days?
Yeah, we have a great suite of analyzes planned.
We call this our Tiger team for a quick look analysis of the sample there.
There's some great instruments right there at Johnson Space Center we'll be doing
and I'll get a little technical here, but for a transform infrared spectroscopy,
which will give us a pretty quick
assessment of the range of minerals that we see in there.
We have scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectrascopy
scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy
to give us elemental abundances.
We'll be sending some of the material to our partners at the Natural History
Museum in London who are experts in X-ray diffraction
and characterizing bulk mineralogy using that material.
So what we're really looking for is hypothesis one.
And if you're interested, I posted the sample
analysis plan on archive.org so anybody can download it.
It's free to all. It's about 300 pages.
So just get ready if you're really wanting to dig into that.
It's quite an engrossing read, I think,
and it'll lay out hypothesis one, which is did we accurately characterize
the bulk mineralogy and chemistry of the surface of the asteroid, i.e.
did our remote sensing instruments
work and did our data processing lead us to the right conclusions?
So I'm going to be looking for the basics.
Are there clay minerals there? Are there carbonate minerals?
Are there organic molecules?
Do we see the iron oxides?
The other things that we predicted on the asteroid surface?
I'm sure there's going to be surprises in there.
Once you get into the dust scale,
you will probably start to see a wide level of diversity.
But it's kind of like a sneak peek of what might be in store for us.
We don't know if the dust, what we call the finds,
there's intermediates courses and large stones.
There might be variations in mineralogy and composition by particle size.
The larger ones may be more robust to disaggregation and the loose stuff
like the one we crushed when we tagged the surface may be preferentially
in the fine grained component.
So it really is to give us a sense of what are we dealing with?
Are we way out of the box in terms of what we built this big plan around?
Or does it look like, Yeah, we got it pretty close.
There's some surprises, but we can still continue
with the sample analysis plan that we laid out.
All right.
Our next question is also from the phone line, Stephen Clark
with Ars Technica.
I thank you for taking my question.
It was my questions have been asked and answered.
But I want to follow up with if you get
your answers a little earlier, take you back inside the helicopter
with you this morning.
I think if I understood your response earlier, some of the calls over the radio
receiving about the rate of descent, what we're exactly what you were expecting,
you know, the drones who may or may or may or may not have been deployed on time,
just on the video when I didn't see the sign of the drogue,
I certainly had my heart pumping
to see if you could talk a little bit more about your feelings
inside the helicopter as some of the calls maybe exactly when you were expecting.
Yeah, I'll take you back even earlier in the morning, Stephen,
because it started out there was several key milestones today
that I was really paying
attention to, things that we talked about a decade ago and longer.
And it's like, okay, now, today it's real.
The first one was the go no go pull, right?
We had to get approval.
We had to get the flight dynamics team, the entry descent landing team.
The spacecraft team had to say there already the range had to be ready.
And of course, our project manager had to have the final authority on that.
We knew we were in good shape there, but you never know, right?
It's like something could have happened in the wee
hours of the morning where I was barely sleeping.
That changed that poll.
So to hear everybody unanimously go, that was that was the first relief.
And then it was powering up the batteries inside the SRC
because they had not been there, been no telemetry from them for over
seven years since we launched because they were passive data.
They had a layer on top that prevented current from flowing.
We had to burn that layer off.
So I got the news 11.44 volts.
Both batteries
because this prime and redundant both were online
and then I knew the parachutes at least had power
because of the batteries were dead.
We knew we were coming in hard already early in the morning.
And then, of course, release of the capsule from the spacecraft.
We had Doppler tracking data.
There were spacecraft indication that the commands had all gone according to plan
so that it was it was on its own and then the divert maneuver
so that the spacecraft wasn't following the capsule.
And so everything on the spacecraft kind of set me up into a reasonably good mood.
And then I knew it was all about the parachute.
That's the only thing that I needed to know
was that that parachute deployed.
So obviously I was keyed into that more than anything.
It was hard to hear in the helicopter.
I didn't have the cool video.
I couldn't see what was on screen.
And maybe that was a good thing because I heard it was a little bit of a
pulse pounding moment.
And I do ask myself, how many of those can you have in one lifetime?
Right. And I might be reaching my limit,
I'm not sure, but it kind of feels like it today.
And so it was you know, I knew we were looking at around 100,000 feet.
We should get confirmation of drogue.
And, you know, we had our amazing range safety officer
Jasmine, I know if you're here, but she's been great to work with.
And so she was the one that was actually getting the callbacks and then and really
relaying that back to us.
And I was like, Do we have drogue?
And she's like, They're not calling Drogue.
And I were like, We're at 60,000 feet and I think I looked at Scott Sanford
and I was like, I don't know.
I said, We should have drogue, but it could be coverage.
It could be that we're not seeing it.
I know the helicopter was was having trouble because of the location
where we had touched down and relays to get the video feed back here.
And so I was mentally preparing myself, like for the worst case scenario,
I always said, this is like you're the championship game.
You've just thrown the touchdown winning pass and you fumble it out of bounds.
That's what my nightmare was.
It's like, I can't lose this at the last minute.
And so I was just trying to make sure
I didn't totally break down in front of an international audience.
Right?
And it's like,
okay, you got to keep it together when you get out of this helicopter,
deal with it, whatever is there, and then mourn
if that's what you're going to have to do.
But then within minutes, you know, Jasmine said, they shoot.
And I was like, that's that's when I just emotionally just let it go.
You know, Tears were streaming down my eyes.
I was like, okay, that's the only thing I needed to hear from this point on.
We know what to do. We're safe, we're home.
We did it.
As I told Lori as we were getting ready.
I can't believe I ate the whole thing right.
From soup to nuts.
Everything is on the flight program for us.
Osiris-Rex went smashingly
This just smashingly
Well, and so enormous pride and gratitude
and and and excitement of the next phase.
Sample analysis.
So much.
We have time for one more from the room especially if our panelists are quick
in their answers.
I will
take this gentleman right here, the dark blue shirt.
Um, passing it from the other side.
It's coming to you if you look the other way for thanks.
Yes. I'm Justin Davenport from NSF.
If Bennu is
a carbonaceous asteroid
and we we now have samples from several
from several asteroids,
which type of asteroid do you
does the scientific community community want in the future?
Which type of asteroids
are you looking at for the next sample mission?
Well, I can tell you my personal preference,
which is we're go and it's a it's a decadal survey priority.
It's comet sample return. Right.
The next big small body sample return challenge is comet sample return.
Right.
Because the one thing that we're not getting with
carbonaceous asteroids are the volatiles, the things that make ices.
And those are critical, you know, especially with these icy surfaces
getting irradiated,
lots of interesting organic molecules can form under those environments.
So we've been working as a team.
And these things, you know, you got to stick with them
to get a comet sample return mission
credibly propose to NASA's at the next we hope new frontiers opportunity.
We think we'll be really competitive in that in that environment.
So I am sorry we don't have time for more questions.
For those who didn't get their questions answered, please do write an email in
and we will try to get your questions answered.
So stay tuned.
You can follow the rest of the mission.
NASA.gov Osiris-rex.
And we will have more information soon about leaving tomorrow on the C-17,
which is parked just outside to get those samples to Houston.
We're going to end with some highlights.
And she was at.
The milestone as our city is experiencing
maximum medium to maximum deceleration.
So you just heard right there, we're experiencing that 5000 degree
Fahrenheit maximum heating.
Ideal, Miles.
So we have confirmed performance. Wow.
And after an exhilarating
streak across Earth's atmosphere, we have parachute deployment.
You can see just a sigh of relief from the team.
I can hear some applause here.
The team, the WB 57. Do
touchdown.
I repeat EDL as far as touchdown.
And touchdown of the OSIRIS-Rex sample return capsule.
A journey of a billion miles to asteroid BENNU and back has come to an end
marking America's first sample return mission of its kind
and opening a time capsule to our ancient solar system.
A sample carrying fixture.
Of the operations WB has located the parachute on the ground.
And you just heard that confirmation from that high altitude plane locating that.