Over the weekend NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft’s reentry capsule landed successfully in the western Utah desert on a military base with samples from the space rock Bennu that the mission visited back in December of 2018.
The spacecraft is now in an extended mission to visit a near earth asteroid known as Apophis on April 8, 2029 where it will study the asteroid for 18 months but not land. Once upon a time the asteroid Apophis was thought to have a chance of smashing into Earth in 2068, but now is no longer considered a threat. So I’ll cross that worry off my list of the millions of things that could destroy our planet.