NASA Launches the Osiris-Rex Spacecraft to Asteroid Bennu

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Source:  By Jonathan Corum, The New York Times

Excerpt: NASA’s mission to grab pieces of an asteroid and bring them back to Earth took off on Thursday night. “You’ll be glad to know we got everything just exactly perfect,” Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, said at a news conference after the launch of the Osiris-Rex spacecraft. The craft began its journey on top of an Atlas 5 rocket that lifted off into the summer sky above Cape Canaveral, Fla. Seven years from now, the craft is to return and parachute a capsule with the asteroid bits into a Utah desert, giving scientists a window to some of the material that made up the early solar system, including some of the molecules that gave rise to life on Earth....

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