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The asteroid sample collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft just experienced its second touchdown in only two days.

The sample — a stash of dirt and gravel that the probe snagged from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 — touched down in the Utah desert on Sunday (Sept. 24), thrilling mission team members and scientists around the world. 

But the asteroid sample stayed in the Beehive State for just a day before boarding a plane to its final destination, which it reached today (Sept. 25).

“Welcome to Houston, OSIRIS-REx! The asteroid sample arrived today in Texas where it will be curated and preserved by our team here at Johnson. The information collected could help scientists around the world investigate planetary formation, the origins of life and how asteroids might impact Earth,” NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC), which is based in Houston, said today in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Related: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu, a 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid, in December 2018. The probe studied Bennu up close for 22 months, then swooped in to grab a sample — marking the very first time a NASA probe had managed to collect pieces of an asteroid in space.

That dive revealed Bennu’s surface to be surprisingly spongy; OSIRIS-REx sank far into the asteroid before backing away to safety. 

OSIRIS-REx left Bennu in May 2021, beginning a long journey back to Earth. At 6:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT) on Sunday, the probe released its sample capsule, which came down to Earth on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range about four hours later — just as planned.

The Bennu sample will now make its way to a newly built curation facility at JSC managed by the agency’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division.

The OSIRIS-REx science team — which includes more than 200 people based at 35 institutions around the world — will then study the sample for about two years in an effort to meet the mission’s main science goals. As the above JSC post noted, those goals include better understanding how the solar system formed and evolved and the role carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in delivering life’s building blocks to Earth.

The science team will have access to about 25% of the Bennu material, which is thought to weigh about 8.8 ounces (250 grams). Four percent of the sample will go to the Canadian Space Agency, which provided OSIRIS-REx’s laser altimeter instrument. 

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will get 0.5% of the material, as part of a deal with NASA that includes collaboration between OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission, which returned a small sample of the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in December 2020.

The remaining 70% of the Bennu sample will remain at JSC “for study by scientists not yet born, using technologies not yet invented, to answer fundamental questions about the solar system,” according to NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return press kit.   

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The three-body problem is a notoriously tricky puzzle in physics and mathematics, and an example of just how complex the natural world is. Two objects orbiting each other, like a lone planet around a star, can be described with just a line or two of mathematical equations. Add a third body, though, and the math becomes much harder. Because each object influences the others with its gravity, calculating a stable orbit where all three objects get along is a complex feat.

Now, an international team of mathematicians claims to have found 12,000 new solutions to the infamous problem — a substantial addition to the hundreds of previously known scenarios. Their work was published as a preprint to the database arXiv, meaning it has not yet undergone peer review.

More than 300 years ago, Isaac Newton wrote down his foundational laws of motion, and mathematicians have been working on solutions to the three-body problem pretty much ever since. There is no single correct answer; instead, there are many orbits that can work within the laws of physics for three orbiting objects. 

Related: The ‘Three-Body Problem’ has perplexed astronomers since Newton formulated it. A.I. cracked it in under a second.

Unlike our planet’s simple loop around the sun, orbits for the three-body problem can look twisted and tangled, like pretzels and scribbles. The 12,000 newly discovered ones are no exception — the three hypothetical objects start at a standstill and, when released, are pulled into various spirals toward one another via gravity. They then fling past one another, moving farther away, until the attraction takes over and they once again come together, repeating this pattern over and over again.

The orbits “have a very beautiful spatial and temporal structure,” lead study author Ivan Hristov, a mathematician at Sofia University in Bulgaria, told  New Scientist. Hristov and colleagues found these orbits using a supercomputer, and he’s confident that with even better tech, he could find “five times more.”

Three-body systems are quite common in the universe; there are plenty of star systems with multiple planets, or even multiple stars orbiting each other. In theory, these new solutions could prove extremely valuable to astronomers trying to explain the cosmos. But they’re only useful if they’re stable, meaning the orbital patterns can repeat over time without breaking apart, flinging one of the component worlds off into space. Just because they’re theoretically stable doesn’t mean they’ll stand up to the many other forces present in a real star system.

“Their physical and astronomical relevance will be better known after the study of stability — it’s very important,” Hristov said.

Juhan Frank, an astronomer at Louisiana State University who wasn’t involved in the work, is skeptical that these orbits will turn out to be stable. They’re “probably never realized in nature,” he told New Scientist. “After a complex and yet predictable orbital interaction, such three-body systems tend to break into a binary and an escaping third body, usually the least massive of the three.”

No matter what, though, these solutions are a mathematical wonder. According to Hristov, “stable or unstable — they are of great theoretical interest.”

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Seven years after it left for the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with a celestial souvenir. On the morning of Sunday, September 24, as it passes by Earth the probe will release a canister holding about 9 ounces of space rock. The container will plummet through the atmosphere, its parachute will unfurl, and it will touch down in the Utah desert at about 8:55 am Mountain time.

Assuming its contents survive the journey unscathed, the return will mark a tantalizing step forward for planetary science. Researchers have long salivated over the prospect of examining pristine asteroid fragments. While meteorites—which are often broken chunks of asteroids—fall from the sky all the time, they’re immediately contaminated by the ground they smash into. This will be a rare look at an untainted rock from space, and it will help scientists understand what Bennu is made of and where it came from. If the mission is successful, it will be only the third asteroid sample return in history—following Japanese space agency missions to Ryugu and Itokawa.

To planetary scientist Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, it’s also “a little bittersweet,” because the program is now coming to an end. Still, he says, “I’m excited to get it into the laboratory, so we can do all this amazing science.” His University of Arizona team will study the composition of the dust and rock fragments in the container and trace any organic molecules they may harbor. The scientists will also be able to compare samples of Bennu to Ryugu.

But first, the capsule, which is circular and about the size of an ice chest, has to make it safely down to Earth. That will mean slowing from 28,000 miles per hour to just 11. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft for NASA and is responsible for the capsule recovery. “We have done sample returns before, so we have that experience,” says Sandra Freund, a systems engineer at Lockheed and the OSIRIS-REx program manager, referring to previous NASA missions that collected materials from a comet and the solar wind. “We know we can do this, but there’s always a risk when you’re bringing something back to Earth. You’ve got atmospheric reentry, which is a very fiery experience. You’ve got parachutes that need to deploy. So there are a number of things that need to go just right.”

The capsule’s built-in heat shield is designed to save it from burning up at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, as a meteor or unprotected satellite that size hurtling through the atmosphere would. “Any time you want to bring a payload through the atmosphere, you need protection for it. It can be pretty gnarly,” says Todd White, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, who worked on the spacecraft’s thermal protection system. The heat shield is made of a lightweight chopped carbon fiber infused with resin, and it’s ablative, meaning that it slowly burns off. “It looks nice and brown on the back and white on the front—but when it lands it’ll look charred and crispy,” White says.

First, the capsule will deploy a small drogue chute to keep itself stable. Then seven minutes into its descent, it will open its main parachute and drift to the ground for six more minutes. Recovery helicopters will get the first view of its rapid descent. Relatively soft soil should cushion the impact when it lands within the Department of Defense’s remote Utah Test and Training Range and Dugway Proving Grounds. It’s an active range, though, so before NASA personnel make their approach to retrieve the container, a military representative will check the area to make sure there’s no unexploded ordnance.