NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission officially surpasses asteroid sample size goal

今日の週末の英語の習慣化の題材は...

asteroid...Bennu と名付けられた隕石群が太古の昔の地球の秘密を解き明かせるのか？

興味ある読者はゆっくり読んでみてください！

Sept. 24 was a big day for NASA, when an orange-and-white capsule containing pieces of an asteroid landed on Earth, charred from its ultrahigh-speed fall through our atmosphere. The asteroid in question, named Bennu, is thought to have been roaming space since the early days of our solar system — meaning these samples could reveal to us what our cosmic neighborhood looked like way before we got here.

Shot into space as part of the agency's OSIRIS-REx mission in 2016, the capsule was enclosed for years within a spacecraft that made a 4-billion-mile-long journey to reach Bennu. Once on the asteroid's surface, it then extended an arm that briefly touched down on the rock in order to retrieve a little bit of its material. 

The hope, scientists had said, was to collect at least 60 grams of Bennu's material — and, on Monday (Oct. 23), the OSIRIS-REx team announced the mighty spacecraft managed to retrieve far more. Far. More.