Midmorning With Aundrea - October 22, 2020 (Part 4)

(Part 4 of 4) NASA is taking samples from the asteroid Bennu and returning them to earth.

This is the largest sampling of an extraterrestrial body since the Apollo program brought back rocks and dust from the moon.

Here's a group of people whose job requires them to look into space and beyond.

This week a nasa spacecraft made the daring attempt to collect a sample from an asteroid, and then bring it back to earth.

If successful, this would be the space agency's largest return of extraterrestrial material, since the apollo program brought back rocks and dust from the moon.

The asteroid, named "bennu , is about as tall as the empire state building.

Mark strassmann got an inside look at the mission.

From earth, it's a pinprick of light in a telescope.

But 200 million miles from earth , an asteroid named "bennu" could ho clues to the birth of our solar system.

The oldest material you could ever hold in your hand is a chunk of an asteroid from outer space.

Dante lauretta's talking about material that's four-and-a-half billion years old.

He's leading nasa's first-ever mission to retrieve a sample from an asteroid.

And liftoff of osiris-rex& the 800-million- dollar, asteroid- hunting robot began chasing bennu four years ago.

We have arrived!

But right away, bennu surprised lauretta's team.

We thought the surface was going to be sandy and beach-like // and then i saw those first images coming in // and i thought, oh, boy, we're in for a real challenge here.

The asteroid was covered in boulders.

To find a safe spot to grab a sample, scientists spent a year mapping every square inch.

They settled on this small clearing, called nightingale crater.

And there's a large rock on the eastern rim that i call mount doom.

That's about 10 meters or 30 feet tall.

And we definitely don't want to fly into that.

The spacecraft's about the size of a large van.

It has to maneuver into an area the size of a few parking spaces.

Its ten-foot long arm ends with a sort-of "spac vacuum cleaner" designed to collect about two ounces of asteroid gravel.

The robot will spend all of ten seconds on bennu before backing away.

The most intriguing part to me of the // mission is the excitement of bringing a sample back to earth.

Dr. lori glaze, nasa's director of planetary science.

It's almost like discovering the dna of the universe, right?

It's exactly like discovering the dna of the universe, at least the dna of our solar system, because this is the material that actually built up who we are here today.

Potentially, a cosmic jackpot.

It would land in utah in 2023.

Mark strassmann, atlanta.