A seven-year space mission to examine the celestial body, which scientists describe as the most dangerous rock for Earth in the solar system, is about to come to a dramatic end.
The Osiris-Rex spacecraft brings to our planet a sample of "soil" from the surface of the asteroid Benu.
This material in the form of powder will be dropped from the spacecraft of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which will fly by the Earth on Sunday.
The sample will be packed in a capsule, which will protect it from a sudden landing in the US state of Utah.
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Scientists believe that the chemical composition of the sample will reveal new information about the formation of the planet 4,5 billion years ago, and perhaps some clues about the origin of life on Earth.
The capsule is expected to land around 8.55:15.55 a.m. local time (XNUMX:XNUMX p.m. CET) on a desert field owned by the US Department of Defense.
It will be a tense day for everyone working on the Osiris-RexS project, especially during the 13 minutes during which the capsule will fall through the Earth's atmosphere.
The box, the size of a car tire, will initially move at a speed of more than 12 kilometers per second and heat up to a temperature of 3.000 degrees Celsius.
But with a thermal shield and parachutes, it should land safely on desert terrain.
"We spent an unusual amount of time preparing for contingencies, everything that could go wrong and all the scary things we could encounter," mission principal investigator Dante Laureta told the BBC.
"But it's good that we practiced and practiced, so now we're ready," he adds.
Osiris-Rex left Earth in 2016 to investigate the asteroid Bennu, which has a very low probability of hitting our planet at the end of the next century.
It took two years to reach this 500-meter-wide rock, and he spent another two years observing the "space mountain" before embarking on a series of maneuvers to collect a sample from its surface.
All that remains is for that material, weighing about 250 grams, to land safely on Earth.
The teams collecting this material are confident, but take nothing for granted.
The forerunner of this mission is Genesis, a capsule that brought solar wind samples to our planet in 2004.
The parachute then did not open and the capsule hit the ground at a speed of more than 300 kilometers per hour, burst and the contents fell out.
"We understand the error with Genesis, which had the gravity switches installed in the opposite position," said Richard Witherspoon of the US company Lockheed Martin, which manufactured the capsule.
"We had a lot of double-checking of the gravity switch on the pod to make sure it was installed correctly, so we didn't really have to worry about it working properly now," he adds.
However, a "failure team" will be on standby in the event of a worst-case scenario.
Meteorologists in Utah have released balloons over the past few days to gather the latest information and help predict the exact landing site.
The capsule will spend the last five minutes of the flight with the main parachute open, but due to the predicted light winds, it should not deviate significantly from the planned route.
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The bigger problem is the high amount of rain in the desert this year and the muddy terrain.
"That's why retrieving the capsule with off-road vehicles will be difficult," says Dan Root, chief meteorologist at US Air Force Base Dugway.
“They can get stuck. But the good thing is that there will be no dust, which is positive for the operation of the equipment," he adds.
The recovery teams plan to fly over the landing site by helicopter, place the capsule in a net and move it temporarily to a special facility in Dugway.
In that sterile room, the box containing the Bennu asteroid samples will be removed, and they will be transported to the Johnson Space Center in Texas for further testing.
All operations after the landing of the capsule were designed in such a way to avoid mixing particles from Earth with the sample, which would later jeopardize the research.
“Bennu is what we call a carbonaceous asteroid. We think that these celestial bodies represent the building material of the planet and that they date back to the formation of the solar system.
"We can find the materials that made the planets, the elements that built our planet, and possibly life on Earth," says Christopher Snead, deputy head of the Osiris-Rex sample section.
When it drops its capsule, this NASA spacecraft will head to another asteroid named Apopis, which it is expected to reach in 2029.
Additional reporting: Rebecca Morrell, Alison Francis and Kevin Church
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