NASA OSIRIS-REx lands after 6 billion KM journey NASA has achieved a historic milestone by successfully bringing back samples from an asteroid named Bennu. In the operation at Utah desert, NASA and the U.S. Air Force collaborated to recover a space capsule containing samples of asteroid, collected by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2020. The OSIRIS-REx probe, after a journey of over 6.2 billion kilometers, released its sample return capsule while it was approximately 100,000 kilometers above Earth. This capsule contained about 250 grams of rocks and other materials from Bennu, which could hold key answers to questions about the origins of life on Earth and the early solar system. the capsule reached speeds of up to 43,450 kilometers per hour, and its heat shield experienced temperatures as high as 2,900 degrees Celsius During its descent through Earth's atmosphere, . Although the capsule deployed its main parachute at a higher altitude than expected, it appeared to land safely. The drogue chute likely deployed but was not visible on monitoring cameras. The entire descent from the edge of the atmosphere to the Utah desert took less than 10 minutes, concluding a remarkable 6.2 billion-kilometer journey. The OSIRIS-REx mission, with a budget of $1 billion, launched in 2016 arrived at Bennu in 2018 then,landed and collected samples of the asteroid in 2020 after orbiting it for 2 years. After capsule landed, experts thoroughly examined the capsule and confirmed it was intact with no breaches. Following this assessment, the capsule was airlifted to a temporary cleanroom at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground. Once safely inside the facility, the capsule was opened, and the canister containing the precious Bennu samples were prepared for transportation. These asteroid materials will be loaded onto an aircraft and flown to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where a newly-constructed facility, the agency's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division, which awaits their arrival. This successful landing and recovery mark the climax of a seven-year mission filled with surprises. When the spacecraft reached Bennu in 2018, scientists discovered that it resembled a pile of gravel and rubble rather than a solid rock. Consequently, they had to reprogram the spacecraft to land in an area significantly smaller than its originally intended landing site. While OSIRIS-REx marks NASA's first-ever asteroid sample collection mission, Japan's space agency, JAXA, has already accomplished two such missions. The first, Hayabusa 1, collected materials from asteroid Itokawa and successfully returned them in 2010. Following that, Hayabusa 2 achieved the collection and return of samples from asteroid Ryugu in 2020.