Dante Lauretta: The Wait for a Billion Dollar Space Sample

Dante Lauretta, Regents’ Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample mission, has been working on bringing back samples from Asteroid Bennu since 2004- and he still has two more years before he might be able to touch them.

We talked to Dante about the amount of patience required when working in science- from submitting (and getting rejected) numerous proposals to seeing births and deaths and marriages and divorces, a lot happens when working on a project for years. We also talked about how his passion for science stems from his love for exploring, and how in two years, when he finally has his asteroid samples, it will be worth a billion dollars.*

*give or take

This episode was produced by Shane M Hanlon and Nisha Mital, and mixed by Collin Warren. Artwork by Karen Romano Young.