Download After 7 Years, NASA's OSIRIS-REx Returns to Earth... With Souvenirs! (MP3, 10.7MB)

NASA sent OSIRIS-REx into space to land on an asteroid and return with a sample of it. A container full of asteroid stuff landed in Utah. LPL's Assistant Professor Jessica Barnes, a co-investigator on the OSIRIS-REx mission and a research team lead, talks about the sample return and what's next.

NPR

Dr. Jessica Barnes is an Assistant Professor at LPL. She is a co-investigator on the OSIRIS-REx mission. In this presentation, she talks about the OSIRIS-REx sample return and what's next for the spacecraft and for the sample analysis. 

SPACEWATCH® is a NASA-funded program at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab that was founded in 1980 to keep track of hazardous asteroids and comets in our solar system that might pose an impact threat to Earth. The program, led by Principal Investigator Melissa Brucker, makes observations 24+ nights a month from Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Their most recent headline-grabbing collaboration was with the NASA DART mission, which smacked a small spacecraft into an asteroid to see how well it could deflect the rock from its orbital trajectory, as a test for planetary defense.