JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. — Teams from NASA and Lockheed Martin Space are readying in the desert of northwest Utah for the return of an asteroid sample collected in a years-long, 4.4 billion-mile mission flown by the Colorado company.
The Osiris-Rex spacecraft, launched in 2016 and has collected material from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, halfway across the solar system in 2020, flies past Earth on Sunday morning to eject a sample canister that, after a fiery entry into the atmosphere, is designed to parachute down for recovery.
Around 2 a.m. Sunday, space agency and Lockheed Martin Space officials will double-check that Osiris-Rex’s trajectory is still on target and issue the final "go or no-go" decision to eject the sample canister for the final leg of its return voyage.
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