Aside from the meteorites that fall to Earth haphazardly, direct analysis of the materials of the solar system has required explorers–both human and robotic–to collect and return samples from the Moon, comets, asteroids, and one day other planets. The four lectures in this year’s series will spotlight the sample return missions that have helped us better understand the origin and evolution of the Earth and other planets.
This lecture series is made possible by the generous support of Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies company, and United Launch Alliance.
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National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC
NASA’s Stardust spacecraft launched in 1999 on a Discovery class mission to collect dust samples from the coma of Comet Wild-2 and samples of interstellar dust passing through our solar system, and return them to Earth for analysis.
National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC
In 2016, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft began its journey to Bennu, a carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid, to collect a sample. The sample returned to Earth in 2023. Analysis of the sample promises to provide insights into the formation of the Earth as a habitable world and the origin of life.
National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC
Some of our biggest questions relating to the formation and planetary-scale evolution of Mars can only be addressed by detailed analyses of carefully selected Martian samples in state-of-the-art Earth-based laboratories.