NOVA

And we have touchdown! (scientists cheer) I'm in awe, really. Everything went phenomenally well. -

Man

I mean I can't believe we actually pulled this off. It was a good day. (chuckles) (inspirational music) -

Woman

We spent years preparing for this, analyzing every scenario. The last 10 minutes, as the spacecraft was descending towards the surface of Bennu, was unreal. There were so many feelings running around in my head. It's sort of hard to articulate them in a small number of words. It was this slow-motion thrill ride. (tense electronic music) We literally expected this asteroid to look like a beach. That is not what Bennu looked like at all. Just rocks everywhere. Oh my gosh, those big boulders were just not what we were expecting to find. There was nowhere on the surface anywhere close to that that is free of hazards. Our landing area is much smaller than what we had anticipated. The tag site right now is about several parking spaces. So, it's a lot smaller area that we need to target. (cool electronic music) Our approach is new, the intention to collect a large amount of material is new. So it's about 30 centimeters in diameter. It looks like a really amazing piece of technology, but quite honestly, it's an air filter. Then our job is to figure out what happened. (inspiring orchestral music) Asteroids actually are remnants leftover from the earliest periods in the history of our solar system. They essentially have locked up inside them many of the secrets of what the solar system was like when it first began. (asteroids crash) Asteroids like Bennu are remnants of that very, very earliest part of solar system history. So, they're little time capsules that record what kinds of chemistry was present. (capsule thuds) Osiris Rex is going to be the largest sample collection robotically in the history of solar system exploration. It's really amazing that these tiny specks of dust grains can tell you so much about how our universe formed, how our solar system formed, how asteroids like Bennu formed, and how Earth formed. We need to keep exploring. It really goes a long way into understanding who we are, how we got here, and what our long term prospects are on this planet. (tones chime)