Dante Lauretta sat in the backseat of a helicopter hovering high above a remote patch of Utah desert, waiting for a small, twinkling speck in the sky to plunge toward earth.
If you didn't know better, you might think what was beginning to burn through the skies above the American southwest in the early hours of September 24, 2023, was a shooting star. But it wasn't a shooting star. Or a meteor. It was a dishwasher-size capsule filled with bits of ancient asteroid-priceless matter from the dawn of the solar system. In other words, it was a treasure chest moving at 27,000 miles per hour and sizzling at a temperature half that of the sun's surface.
That small streak of light represented the end of a NASA-led interplanetary mission suffused with peril. Lauretta and his colleagues had spent nearly 20 years building a spacecraft designed to collect material from an asteroid and return to Earth. From these precious grains, they hoped to gain insight about the formation of the solar system, of Earth, and maybe even of life itself.
What the capsule had to do now, completely autonomously, was simple: stay in one piece as it reentered the atmosphere, open its parachutes, and softly touch down on an Air Force bombing range without detonating any unexploded ordnance nearby.
By 8:44 a.m., the capsule was 102,300 feet above the ground, and its drogue parachute-the canopy meant to stabilize its plunge-should have opened by now. But no one could see it. Throngs of scientists and engineers who had worked on the spacecraft, spread out across mission control rooms in Arizona and Colorado, were now deathly quiet.
It looked like something had gone wrong. And all Lauretta, the mission's leader, could do was watch, and hope, that his life's obsession wasn't about to be scattered across the desert. He wasn't even supposed to oversee the mission.
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