All you need to know about NASA’s asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx

• On September 24, NASA successfully brought its first-ever samples of an asteroid, from deep space back to Earth
• OSIRIS-REx has been on a seven-year-long mission to bring back samples from asteroid Bennu, 6.2 kilometres away in deep space
• After its launch in 2016, it arrived at Bennu in 2018, and spent its first year mapping the surface of the asteroid
• In October 2020 it carefully descended on the asteroid’s surface to collect 250 grams of soil and rock samples
• These asteroid samples could give us new info into the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, and the origins of life
• Asteroid Bennu is one of the most hazardous space rocks according to NASA, with an outside chance of colliding with earth in the next 300 years