The Space Review: Review: The Asteroid Hunter

by Jeff Foust
Monday May 6, 2024

The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of Our Solar System
by Dante S. Lauretta
Grand Central Publishing, 2024
hardcover, 336 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-5387-2294-7
$30

Many people can identify a particular point where they found their purpose in life. It could be some event, celebratory or traumatic; a chance meeting with someone; or maybe a book. For Dante Lauretta it was an advertisement in a student newspaper.

‘WORK FOR NASA’ stated the full-page ad he came across while perusing the Arizona diurnal wildcat after a shift as a short-term cook at a restaurant in Tucson. Lauretta was a student at the University of Arizona at the time and was about to graduate, but didn’t know what he would do next. The prospect of working with NASA – in this case through the agency’s short-lived support for SETI research – fulfilled that goal: “It was like the dirty window I had been looking through all my life was being wiped clean. I had found my path,” he recalls in his memoirs, The asteroid hunter.

Most of the book follows Lauretta after she returns to college about a decade later, this time on the faculty of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), with an interest in cosmochemistry and astrobiology. LPL director Mike Drake offered him the opportunity to take a leading role in a mission developed by the laboratory and Lockheed Martin: returning samples from an asteroid. Drake would be the principal investigator (PI), managing the mission, while Lauretta would provide oversight of the science.

LPL and Lockheed twice pitched the mission, called OSIRIS, to NASA’s Discovery program of relatively low-cost science missions, but were not selected. Then an opportunity arose to offer a scaled-up version of the mission for the larger New Frontiers program. That version of the mission, now known as OSIRIS-REx (for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer), was selected for development in 2011.

That selection was both the culmination of years of development, but also just the beginning. OSIRIS-REx would face many of the familiar technical and programmatic challenges of any mission, compounded by tragedy: Drake, who had been in poor health for years, died just a few months after NASA selected the mission, leaving Lauretta the became PI. Now he would have to deal with the general aspects of leading a mission.

The book provides a detailed insider’s perspective of the development and subsequent operation of OSIRIS-REx as it headed to the asteroid Bennu to collect samples it returned to Earth last September. For those who followed the mission, there aren’t many new details in the book that weren’t mentioned during the mission, but it was interesting to read how he and the mission team dealt with various obstacles. (An interesting note: At one point, Lauretta and the OSIRIS-REx team were told that JPL was lobbying NASA headquarters to cancel the mission, which had yet to be formally confirmed for development, and divert resources on the Asteroid Redirect Mission, arguing that ARM was a presidential priority and that it could return tons, not grams, of material. NASA decided to go ahead with OSIRIS-REx, and ARM soon died.)

The story of OSIRIS-REx is about science and technology, but also about people: “the beautiful ensemble of scientists, engineers and cosmic enthusiasts who had united to manifest this vision,” he writes in the book’s epilogue. The journey that started with seeing an ad in the newspaper continues with samples of an asteroid now being studied in labs by scientists like Lauretta, in the hopes of better understanding our solar system and ourselves – and perhaps being that thing that inspires offers for another generation.

Jeff Foust ([email protected]) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer at SpaceNews. He also runs the website Spacetoday.net. The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

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