Dugway Proving Ground (DPG) has a long-standing history of working closely with NASA, including the Gensis and Stardust sample return missions in the 2000s. The Michael Army Airfield was an alternate landing site during the Space Shuttle missions as well.
DPG hosted humanity’s latest superlative in space exploration, serving as the recovery site for a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu by the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-- Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) space capsule.
The landing attracted intense national and international media attention, with more than 60 outlets present on post from the predawn hours to cover the landing and recovery of the sample.
The feat was nearly 20 years in the making. First conceived of by OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dr. Dante Lauretta, a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, in 2004, NASA launched the probe in 2016. After orbiting in the vicinity of Bennu for nearly two years, the craft landed and collected a sample in 2020.
“Our primary science goal is understanding the delivery of organic molecules to the early Earth and maybe even gaining insight into the origin of life,” said Lauretta.
It was the first United States mission to collect a sample from an asteroid. Bennu is currently the smallest object ever orbited by a spacecraft, and OSIRIS-REx achieved the tightest orbit around a celestial body in human history during its lengthy mission. In all, OSIRIS-Rex traveled nearly 4 billion miles to deliver what scientists expect will be a ‘time capsule’ of the early universe. The mission leaders chose Bennu as a sample site due to a variety of complex factors.
“We didn’t want to get too close to the sun because the spacecraft would overheat or need a very expensive thermal control system,” said Lauretta. “We didn’t want to get too far away because we were using solar power and wanted to maintain relatively small solar arrays.”
Further, accomplishing a sample return necessitated an asteroid at a similar angle to the Earth to protect the sample’s heat shield on reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. This narrowed the field to a few hundred asteroids, and Bennu was relatively large—about 1600 feet across—and very dark, reflecting only about 4% of the sunlight that hits its surface, which scientists believed meant the asteroid was rich in carbon, the building block of life.
NASA chose DPG and the Utah Test and Training Range for its isolation and infrastructure to handle the painstaking recovery of the sample.
“It’s not just what support Dugway is giving, its what support Army Test and Evaluation Command is giving,” said Col. James Harwell, DPG Commander. “We have folks from White Sands Missile Range and Yuma Proving Ground, as well as the support of our sister site the Utah Test and Training Range, run by the Air Force, that are supporting this event. This is a huge undertaking for Dugway Proving Ground, but it is a team effort that goes well beyond Dugway’s borders.”
DPG personnel had been planning for the big day for months, but the extensive support they provided was not a detriment to the post’s ordinary mission on behalf of the nation’s chemical and biological defense testing mission.
“Surprisingly it has been under the radar, so to speak,” said Damon Nicholson, a DPG program manager. “From a Dugway point of view, we’re just in the hangar and not doing a lot of outdoor testing and using a lot of resources that would otherwise be using out on the field.”
Once the sample was returned to Dugway’s Michael Army Airfield, the recovery crew took the capsule to a mobile clean room that allowed the team to use nitrogen to carefully clean any debris the capsule picked up in the atmosphere prior to opening it, ensuring the sample from the asteroid would not be adulterated prior to undergoing intense study at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Other support DPG provided included weather forecasting by DPG meteorologists in the days leading up to the landing, which was critically important to the call to allow the mission to proceed and to arm the recovery team with the maximum amount of information prior to their carefully choreographed and rehearsed recovery operation. The meteorology team launched radiosondes attached to weather balloons to double check upper-level winds that could influence the trajectory of the craft as it came in. Gusty winds at ground level could also move the parachute along the ground once it landed. Three days before landing Dugway experienced uncharacteristic rainfall that caused some concern of delays in recovering the capsule due to muddy ground conditions, but favorable weather in the proceeding days dried the saturated ground sufficiently.
“It gets pretty slippery out there,” said Dan Ruth, DPG’s lead meteorologist. “When its wet the mud takes on the consistency of modeling clay, so it sticks to the treads of tires and your feet.
The Regolith Explorer will continue its journey through the cosmos in a daring encore as OSIRIS-Apex, and by 2029 will enter the orbit of the asteroid Apophis for study.
“We are satisfied with all of the support we’ve received at Dugway and Utah Test and Training Range,” said Lauretta. “One of the things we always strived with was that we were one team, whether military, government, industry, or academia, and our military partners embraced that.”
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