Wig_Mtn_View_OREx – OSIRIS-REx Mission

A landscape view of nothing but daytime sky, brownish desert, and mountains in the distance. Fluffy clouds hang at the top of the image, just above the mountains, casting a dark shadow over the otherwise sun-lit surface. A dusting of snow covers the desert floor at the foreground of the image. A bush with dry yellow buds stands in foreground, capped by handfuls of snow left over from a melt.

A view from the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range, where NASA’s sample of asteroid Bennu will land on Sept. 24, 2023. The scene looks west from Wig Mountain towards the Nevada border and the desert basin where the sample capsule will land. Credit: NASA Goddard/Dan Gallagher

About the OSIRIS-REx Mission

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, delivered rocks and dust from asteroid Bennu to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023. The pristine material from Bennu – which the spacecraft collected from the asteroid's surface in 2020 – will offer generations of scientists a window into the time when the Sun and planets were forming about 4.5 billion years ago. After its sample delivery, OSIRIS-REx continued on to a new mission to asteroid Apophis, and was renamed OSIRIS-APEX (OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer). Learn more about the OSIRIS-REx mission.