A tiny shipment grabbed from a space rock touched down in the Utah desert on Sunday.
For the first time, NASA has returned some dust and other bits of an asteroid collected in space to Earth for study. Pieces of a large asteroid named Bennu were jarred loose and collected nearly three years ago by NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft, which launched over seven years ago from Cape Canaveral, Florida. On Sunday morning, the spacecraft released a capsule that landed a little over four hours later, at 9:52 a.m. PT, in the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. Within 20 minutes, scientists, engineers and military personnel arrived by helicopter to inspect and secure the capsule, which was transported to a nearby cleanroom. It will be moved to Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday. "While this may feel like the end of an incredible chapter, it's truly just the beginning of another," Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for Osiris-Rex based at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. "We now have the…