Interstellar freight bypasses Houston Intercontinental airport
At the end of last week Nasa’s first asteroid sample (250 g) landed at Ellington airport (EFD), 28 km southeast of downtown Houston, and not at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH). The extra-terrestrial material then loaded into a truck and driven to Nasa’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC).
It took years of work by Nasa’s Osiris-Rex team to collect a capsule of rocks and dust from asteroid ‘101955 Bennu’, 500 m wide. The valuable freight landed on 24 September at a test and training facility near Salt Lake City in Utah before its contents were flown to Texas.
The samples from ‘101955 Bennu’ will help scientists make discoveries to better understand planet formation and the origin of organics and water that led to life on Earth, as well as benefit humanity by learning more about potentially hazardous asteroids. (ah)