An Innovative Spacecraft Makes Contact with an Asteroid

A new book tells the story of the mastermind who directed NASA’s daring OSIRIS-REx mission.

Dante Lauretta grew up hiking and camping in the Arizona desert, a hobby that revealed spectacular views of the night sky, fostering his interest in astronomy. After getting a PhD at the University of Arizona, Lauretta joined the faculty there, and when he was later offered the chance to be part of an asteroid sample-return mission, he couldn’t say no. On September 24, 2023, the OSIRIS-REx capsule brought rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu to Earth, a triumph for which Lauretta had devoted 16 years of his life. In his new book, The Asteroid Hunter, Lauretta provides a riveting account of the bold expedition. The National Air and Space Museum has selected Lauretta and the entire OSIRIS-REx team as the recipient of the 2025 Michael Collins Trophy for Current Achievement. Lauretta recently spoke to Air & Space Quarterly senior editor Diane Tedeschi.

Initially, your entire group was responsible for selecting the landing site. Ultimately, you chose a site called Nightingale in a northern crater of Bennu—why?

I was hoping that the team would come to a uniform consensus—unanimous—and that it would be overwhelmingly obvious which landing site we should choose. I was also hoping I wouldn’t have to reject anyone else’s choice. But then the team split over which landing site offered the best scientific return and which site was the best place for the spacecraft to safely make contact with Bennu. It was science versus safety. I had worked with the people on this team for over a decade now, and I knew their quirks and personalities. I knew who was overly cautious and who was willing to take risks. All of that was in the background as I was trying to make a decision. I knew that the engineering team leaned toward an overabundance of caution: They didn’t want the asteroid’s rugged surface to jeopardize the spacecraft during extraction of the sample. But the science had to take the lead here. So I let science be my guide in that final decision, and my gut was telling me to choose Nightingale.

You wrote about another mission, called Genesis, which collected solar wind particles, and the sample capsule crash-landed in Utah in 2004. Safe to say that space exploration comes with an acceptance of risk?

Yes, I was front row to so many spacecraft failures. It was disheartening. I would say risk is something you accept, but more importantly, it’s something you manage. That was really the key to our success. We did active risk management from day one. Everybody on the team was involved in it. There were open lines of communication to leadership. If anybody on the floor had a problem they were worried about, they could communicate that. We had this communication structure in place from the beginning of step one in the proposal, when we were outlining the biggest challenges. How do we allocate our resources to effectively mitigate risk, for example? There was always redundancy in mission-critical systems, so any one thing could break. We were what we call single-fault tolerant. So, of course, there’s risk. You’re dealing with explosives and the harsh environment of space. You’re doing things that have never been done before, and managing risk is the key to success.

What sorts of skills are needed to oversee missions like OSIRIS-REx?

I would say I was one-third project manager, one-third system engineer, and—on a good day—one-third scientist. Most of the time I was in leadership, I was management, and I was learning aerospace engineering as I went. That was really important for the success of the program: to know how the spacecraft operates. I spent a lot of time in the high bay as the spacecraft was being manufactured and assembled, which was critical for me. I learned an enormous amount from the people that were there installing the components on the vehicle. And vice versa, because they didn’t know what each thing did, they just knew where to put it and what wires to connect and bolts to tighten and all that. But I would tell them what a component did on the mission, and I think that made them work that much harder because they took ownership of the spacecraft, and they really believed in the program.

This question is for your scientist persona. Where do you think we are in our understanding of the solar system? Do we have a firm knowledge of, say, 10 to 15 percent of it?

Less than one percent. There is so much to explore. There is so much unknown still out there. We’re just opening our eyes to what’s going on in our solar system.

What was the most surprising or unexpected thing that happened as the mission unfolded?

There are so many. I call Bennu the “trickster asteroid” because it constantly surprised us and challenged us. The most surprising thing that directly impacted the mission is the rugged nature of Bennu’s surface. We really got that wrong. We spent a lot of time analyzing data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and this data had convinced us beyond a reasonable doubt that Bennu’s surface was smooth—covered with a material the size of small gravel. And I repeated this description of Bennu’s surface in front of so many stakeholders, in front of NASA review panels, in front of the press, in front of the team, and it just became dogma that this is what it was going to be, and we knew what we were doing. When you have that much emotionally and intellectually invested in an outcome and then you find out you’re completely wrong…let’s just say it’s very humbling. Suddenly, we were admitting that we didn’t know at all what we were talking about. 

You talk about the success of OSIRIS-REx being a blueprint for how to do high-risk robotic space missions. What missions would you like to see for the future?

Where would I want to go next? What do I think is the next frontier? Well, more sample returns for sure. Having a sample in the laboratory—there’s nothing that can replace it in terms of the detailed knowledge you can gain. So we really need to get serious about regular sample returns from across the solar system. There’s Mars, Venus, comets, and of course lunar sample returns. These are all things we should be taking a serious look at, and we should be building an archive of the geologic materials that make up the planetary bodies and the small bodies of the solar system. 

There is also the search for life. We should be looking for places where life might exist or might have gone extinct. That would include the subsurface of Mars and the ocean moons in the outer solar system, including Europa, Enceladus, and Titan. I think we should be looking at getting into those oceans. It would be incredibly hard to do—you would need submersible vehicles—but the payoff is just enormous because I’m convinced that somewhere within our solar system there is another biosphere. And we just need to get serious about finding it.

How did you feel when the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample container was finally opened at Johnson Space Center in Houston?

It was a surreal experience. To think back over two decades of your life, and you’ve been dreaming of that moment every day: What is it going to be? What is it going to look like? All the anxiety, all the hard work, the sleepless nights, the time away from the family—all of that just comes crashing down on you. And I’m an emotional guy. I’m not afraid to break into tears, and I was sobbing. The emotional relief of, wow, we actually did it. The moment was also bittersweet because I cherished the adventure, and to think, well, now it’s over. We’re doing the scientific analysis of the samples, which is amazing, but it’s not the same as flying a spacecraft to an asteroid. I kind of miss it.

How long will the samples be studied? Are we talking months, years?

The OSIRIS-REx program is scheduled to wind down at the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 2025. But people will keep studying the samples. They’re at NASA, they’re available for research. It’s like the Antarctic meteorites. People can request samples for their studies, and so the team and the community will be analyzing this really for decades and decades into the future. [Researchers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., are part of the science community that is studying the OSIRIS-REx samples. Erica R. Jawin, a geologist at the National Air and Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, was part of the OSIRIS-REx team during the mission's orbital phase. Jawin is also a co-investigator on the science team of the OSIRIS-APEX mission, which is sending the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to a new asteroid, Apophis.]

What are some of the highlights that have been gleaned from studying the samples?

So Bennu is clearly a fragment of a much larger world, and that world was sopping wet—maybe even an ocean-level environment. Bennu is also loaded with diverse organic material. We have all these amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. We have the nucleobases—which are the letters of the genetic code—and a host of other molecules that we’re still sorting through that look highly relevant to biology and the origin of life. We’re finding salt minerals, clearly indicating a salty ocean water that evaporated away. The samples from Bennu are a glimpse into a now-dead world that probably followed some of the major steps towards the origin of life and was critical in delivering all that material to the early Earth—so that we could be a habitable world and life could originate here.

This article, originally titled “The Asteroid Wrangler,” is from the Spring 2025 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

Want to receive ad-free hard copies of Air & Space Quarterly? Join the Museum's National Air and Space Society to subscribe.