Planetary scientist Dante Lauretta spent the last two decades pitching, preparing, and pondering a mission unlike one he or NASA had ever tried: OSIRIS-REx, the space agency’s first attempt at retrieving a sample from an asteroid.
Lauretta is now settling into his new role as an asteroid sample scientist. But way before that he began chronicling his epic career in a book. The Asteroid Hunter (on shelves now) takes readers through Lauretta’s out-of-this-world ventures, including the monumental effort it took to get a spacecraft off the ground, to an asteroid, back to Earth, and on to a new asteroid.
This month, Lauretta spoke to Inverse about the keystone to the entire mission, as well as what might be hiding inside the carbon-rich, ultra-dark asteroid samples.
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