NASA effort to bring home asteroid rocks will end this weekend in triumph or a crash
NPR Online NewsSep 18, 2023
The Facts
Completing its seven-year, four-billion-mile trek through space and back, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft landed in the desert of the US military's Utah Test and Training Range Sunday, carrying the largest soil sample ever collected from an asteroid.
The material from the 4.5B-year-old asteroid called Bennu, which was 200M miles away when the capsule made contact, is believed to contain dust and pebbles from the time our solar system first formed. It will also be the largest amount of space material brought home since the Apollo astronauts returned with moon rocks.
The Spin
Narrative A
While some will argue studying a bunch of space rocks is a waste of time and money, celestial missions like the OSIRIS-REx are necessary for understanding how the Earth formed and the potential risks of asteroids and meteorites colliding with Earth. Furthermore, the existence, or at least potential existence, of water has been found on space rocks like Bennu, which provides scientists with a puzzle piece in the quest to find extraterrestrial life. If we wish to understand our solar system and protect Earth from enormous flying rocks, we best not defund the only agency in search of such answers.
Narrative B
The fact isn't that NASA programs are useless, but when Congress first funded the planetary defense program almost 20 years ago, it didn't expect a 4,000% budget increase while allocating less than 1% of it to actually defending the Earth from incoming asteroids. NASA, along with the congressmen who see over the agency, must revert to its original promise to study planetary defense of interplanetary objects — otherwise, space exploration is simply a bottomless pit with no fiscal responsibility that the American people can't afford right now.
