{"id":172732,"date":"2023-09-24T21:30:10","date_gmt":"2023-09-25T02:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/nasas-first-asteroid-sample-has-landed-now-secure-in-clean-room"},"modified":"2023-09-24T21:30:10","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T02:30:10","slug":"nasas-first-asteroid-sample-has-landed-now-secure-in-clean-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/nasas-first-asteroid-sample-has-landed-now-secure-in-clean-room","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s First Asteroid Sample Has Landed, Now Secure in Clean Room"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasas-first-asteroid-sample-has-landed-now-secure-in-clean-room.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security \u2013 Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, in a targeted area of the Department of Defense\u2019s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n<p>Within an hour and a half, the capsule was transported by helicopter to a temporary clean room set up in a hangar on the training range, where it now is connected to a continuous flow of nitrogen.<\/p>\n<p>Getting the sample under a \u201cnitrogen purge,\u201d as scientists call it, was one of the OSIRIS-REx team\u2019s most critical tasks today. Nitrogen is a gas that doesn\u2019t interact with most other chemicals, and a continuous flow of it into the sample container inside the capsule will keep out earthly contaminants to leave the sample pure for scientific analyses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security \u2013 Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, in a targeted area of the Department of Defense\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1492,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-security","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/465"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}