A NASA space capsule carrying the largest soil sample ever collected from the surface of an asteroid has landed in the Utah desert seven years after the mission's launch. Flight Control announced on Sunday. The gumdrop-shaped capsule, released from the robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx as the mothership passed within 108,000km (67,000 miles) of Earth hours earlier, touched down within a designated landing zone west of Salt Lake City on the United States military's vast Utah Test and Training Range. The samples will be flown on Monday to a new lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The building already houses nearly 400kg (842lb) of moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts more than a half-century ago.

A space capsule carrying a sample of rocky material removed from the surface of an asteroid three years ago is expected to make a parachute landing in the Utah desert on Sunday. If successful, the OSIRIS-REx mission, a joint effort between NASA and scientists at the University of Arizona, would mark the third asteroid sample, and by far the largest, ever returned to Earth for analysis. OSIRIS-REx collected its samples from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid, before embarking on a 1.9-billion-km (1.2-billion-mile) journey back to Earth in May 2021. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) is an unmanned spacecraft from NASA that was sent to collect samples from Bennu. The spacecraft was equipped with cameras to capture images that were essential to collecting samples from the asteroid during the mission.

Its cargo is so precious it could help answer some of humanity's biggest existential questions. That's why there is so much excitement about the return of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which will drop a capsule full of 4.5 billion-year-old space dust back to Earth on Sunday. The 8.8oz (250g) sample, audaciously grabbed from the mountain-sized asteroid Bennu in October 2020, could shed light on how life emerged on Earth and whether we are alone in the universe. OSIRIS-REx began its two-year, four-month journey home in May 2021, having been powered down to conserve energy during the trip. In the early hours of Sunday, however, the probe will be woken from this low-power mode ahead of its all-important delivery.

Planet Earth is about to receive a special delivery -- the biggest sample yet from an asteroid. A United States space agency (NASA) spacecraft will fly by Earth on Sunday and drop off what is expected to be at least a cupful of rubble it grabbed from the asteroid Bennu, closing out a seven-year quest. The sample capsule will parachute into the Utah desert as its mothership, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, zooms off for an encounter with another asteroid. Scientists anticipate getting about 250g (0.5lb) of pebbles and dust, much more than the teaspoon or so brought back by Japan from two other asteroids. No other country has fetched pieces of asteroids, preserved time capsules from the dawn of our solar system that can help explain how Earth -- and life -- came to be.

NASA has spent seven years trying to prevent Bennu -- an asteroid taller than the Empire State Building and named after ancient Egypt's fiery bird-god -- from crashing cataclysmically into Earth. While Bennu's chances of impact are just 1-in-2,700, more than five times a person's chance of being struck by lightning, NASA's team nevertheless has categorized it as one of the two'most hazardous known asteroids.' In a worst-case scenario, the roughly 510-meter wide, carbon-based behemoth would smash into Earth with 1,200 megatons of energy: 24 times the power of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated (the Soviet Union's'Tsar Bomba'). If it happens, Bennu's impact would unleash its 1.2 gigaton impact 159 years from this Sunday, on September 24, 2182. While Bennu is nowhere near the size of the dino-killing, six-mile across space rock that hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago, astronomers believe that the asteroid'could cause continental devastation if it became an Earth impactor.'

It has been billed as NASA's'asteroid autumn' and involves a trio of exciting missions that could answer some truly mind-boggling questions. From offering clues to how life on Earth began, to unlocking the secrets of the solar system, key milestones for each voyage are due to play out over the next six weeks. They include one rocket launch, a distant fly-by between Jupiter and Mars, and the recovery of ancient space rocks in the Utah desert that could contain the ingredients for life. Of the three, the lift-off of NASA's Psyche spacecraft probably sounds the most mundane -- but no so fast. That is also a fascinating mission, because it is setting off on a 2.5 billion-mile (4 billion-kilometre) journey to find out once and for all if a metal-rich asteroid really could bring down the world's economy.

Missions to small celestial bodies rely heavily on optical feature tracking for characterization of and relative navigation around the target body. While deep learning has led to great advancements in feature detection and description, training and validating data-driven models for space applications is challenging due to the limited availability of large-scale, annotated datasets. This paper introduces AstroVision, a large-scale dataset comprised of 115,970 densely annotated, real images of 16 different small bodies captured during past and ongoing missions. We leverage AstroVision to develop a set of standardized benchmarks and conduct an exhaustive evaluation of both handcrafted and data-driven feature detection and description methods. Next, we employ AstroVision for end-to-end training of a state-of-the-art, deep feature detection and description network and demonstrate improved performance on multiple benchmarks. The full benchmarking pipeline and the dataset will be made publicly available to facilitate the advancement of computer vision algorithms for space applications.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission will leave asteroid Bennu today and begin its 1.4 billion mile, two year long journey back to the Earth, the space agency confirmed. OSIRIS-REx (the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) was the first NASA mission to visit a near-Earth asteroid, survey the surface, and collect a sample to deliver to Earth. The spaceship was sent to study Bennu, an asteroid around the size of the Empire State Building and 200 million miles away, between the orbit of Earth and Mars. OSIRIS-REx gathered 2.1 ounces (60 grams) of rock and dust during its land and grab mission to the surface of the giant space rock, filling its storage compartment. It will begin its long journey home at 21:00 BST (16:00 EDT), with a live broadcast from NASA sharing the moment it fires its thrusters to push away from Bennu's orbit. If all goes to plan, OSIRIS-REx will orbit the sun twice, travelling 1.4 billion miles as it lines up with Earth, returning its samples in Utah on September 24, 2023.

U.S. Space Force officials swear in first recruits for the defense branch on'Fox & amp; Friends.' CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A NASA spacecraft is stuffed with so much asteroid rubble from this week's grab that it's jammed open and precious particles are drifting away in space, scientists said Friday. Scientists announced the news three days after the spacecraft named Osiris-Rex briefly touched asteroid Bennu, NASA's first attempt at such a mission. The mission's lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said Tuesday's operation 200 million miles away collected far more material than expected for return to Earth -- in the hundreds of grams. The sample container on the end of the robot arm penetrated so deeply into the asteroid and with such force, however, that rocks got sucked in and became wedged around the rim of the lid. In this image taken from video released by NASA, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft touches the surface of asteroid Bennu on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2020.

Cape Canaveral, Florida – A NASA spacecraft is stuffed with so much asteroid rubble from this week's grab that it's jammed open and precious particles are drifting away in space, scientists said Friday. Scientists announced the news three days after the spacecraft named Osiris-Rex briefly touched asteroid Bennu, NASA's first attempt at such a mission. The mission's lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said Tuesday's operation 200 million miles away collected far more material than expected for return to Earth – in the hundreds of grams. The sample container on the end of the robot arm penetrated so deeply into the asteroid and with such force, however, that rocks got sucked in and became wedged around the rim of the lid. Scientists estimate the sampler pressed as much as 19 inches (48 centimeters) into the rough, crumbly, black terrain.