A capsule containing asteroid rock fragments will land in the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023. This capsule will be released by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and contain samples from the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu. This visualization takes viewers to the Utah desert where the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range is located and where the capsule is expected to land. A team with the OSIRIS-REx mission will recover the sample return capsule from the landing area via helicopter and travel to a temporary cleaning room. The visualization then zooms to the area of the temporary cleaning room where a designated press site is also located.
Imagery for this visualization were sourced from NASA’s Blue Marble dataset and Landsat 9.
GCMD keywords can be found on the Internet with the following citation:
Olsen, L.M., G. Major, K. Shein, J. Scialdone, S. Ritz, T. Stevens, M. Morahan, A. Aleman, R. Vogel, S. Leicester, H. Weir, M. Meaux, S. Grebas, C.Solomon, M. Holland, T. Northcutt, R. A. Restrepo, R. Bilodeau, 2013. NASA/Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Earth Science Keywords. Version 8.0.0.0.0