Imagine spending seven years and over a billion dollars to build a cosmic vault, then watching your sample leak into space because you grabbed too much. That was the crisis facing NASA’s OSIRIS-REx team in October 2020. This episode walks through the full mission, from the choice of the carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid Bennu to the sample findings published in January 2025.

We explain why Bennu matters for planetary defense, including its small but statistically significant chance of impacting Earth between 2169 and 2199 and the Yarkovsky effect that requires close-up thermal measurements. We describe the record one-kilometer orbit with a 62-hour period, the student-built REXIS instrument that accidentally caught a black hole X-ray burst, and the hydrazine contamination worries that forced a passive descent. Then we cover the touch-and-go nitrogen burst that overfilled the collector, the emergency stowage, the 2023 return with a failed drogue parachute, the two stuck fasteners that delayed opening for three months, and the 121.6 grams recovered.

• Why scooping does not work in microgravity and how TAGSAM sneezes nitrogen instead
• The scrapped spin maneuver that would have flung the sample into space
• Reentry at 27,650 miles per hour and the redundancy that saved the capsule
• Ammonia, 14 amino acids, and all four DNA nucleobases found in the dust
• A 50-50 mix of left- and right-handed amino acids and why that rules out life