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NASA's First Asteroid Sample Parachutes into Utah Desert

As the Sun rises recovery team members take off in helicopters flying into the Utah desert to participate in the asteroid sample return and recovery mission at Dugway, Utah, on September 24, 2023. (Photo by GEORGE FREY / AFP)
As the Sun rises recovery team members take off in helicopters flying into the Utah desert to participate in the asteroid sample return and recovery mission at Dugway, Utah, on September 24, 2023. (Photo by GEORGE FREY / AFP)
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NASA's First Asteroid Sample Parachutes into Utah Desert

As the Sun rises recovery team members take off in helicopters flying into the Utah desert to participate in the asteroid sample return and recovery mission at Dugway, Utah, on September 24, 2023. (Photo by GEORGE FREY / AFP)
As the Sun rises recovery team members take off in helicopters flying into the Utah desert to participate in the asteroid sample return and recovery mission at Dugway, Utah, on September 24, 2023. (Photo by GEORGE FREY / AFP)

A NASA space capsule carrying the largest soil sample ever scooped up from the surface of an asteroid streaked through Earth's atmosphere on Sunday and parachuted into the Utah desert, delivering the celestial specimen to scientists.

The gumdrop-shaped capsule, released from the robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx as the mothership passed within 67,000 miles of Earth hours earlier, touched down within a designated landing zone west of Salt Lake City on the US military's vast Utah Test and Training Range.

The final descent and landing, shown on a NASA livestream, capped a six-year joint mission between the US space agency and the University of Arizona. It marked only the third asteroid sample, and by far the biggest, ever returned to Earth for analysis, following two similar missions by Japan's space agency ending in 2010 and 2020.

OSIRIS-REx collected its specimen three years ago from Bennu, a small, carbon-rich asteroid discovered in 1999. The space rock is classified as a "near-Earth object" because it passes relatively close to our planet every six years, though the odds of an impact are considered remote.

Apparently made up of a loose collection of rocks, like a rubble pile, Bennu measures just 500 meters (1,600 ft) across, making it slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall but tiny compared with the Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.

OSIRIS-REx is already chasing after the asteroid Apophis, and will reach it in 2029.

NASA’s plans to return samples from Mars are on hold after an independent review board criticized the cost and complexity. The Martian rover Perseverance has spent the past two years collecting core samples for eventual transport to Earth.

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Blood Tests Allow 30-year Estimates of Women's Cardio Risks, New Study Says

A woman jogs in a park in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire near Nantes, France January 19, 2024. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
A woman jogs in a park in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire near Nantes, France January 19, 2024. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
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Blood Tests Allow 30-year Estimates of Women's Cardio Risks, New Study Says

A woman jogs in a park in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire near Nantes, France January 19, 2024. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
A woman jogs in a park in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire near Nantes, France January 19, 2024. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights

Women’s heart disease risks and their need to start taking preventive medications should be evaluated when they are in their 30s rather than well after menopause as is now the practice, said researchers who published a study on Saturday.

Presenting the findings at the European Society of Cardiology annual meeting in London, they said the study showed for the first time that simple blood tests make it possible to estimate a woman’s risk of cardiovascular disease over the next three decades.

"This is good for patients first and foremost, but it is also important information for (manufacturers of) cholesterol lowering drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs, and lipoprotein(a)lowering drugs - the implications for therapy are broad," said study leader Dr. Paul Ridker of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Reuters reported.

Current guidelines “suggest to physicians that women should generally not be considered for preventive therapies until their 60s and 70s. These new data... clearly demonstrate that our guidelines need to change,” Ridker said. “We must move beyond discussions of 5 or 10 year risk."

The 27,939 participants in the long-term Women’s Health Initiative study had blood tests between 1992 and 1995 for low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C or “bad cholesterol”), which are already a part of routine care.

They also had tests for high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) - a marker of blood vessel inflammation - and lipoprotein(a), a genetically determined type of fat.

Compared to risks in women with the lowest levels of each marker, risks for major cardiovascular events like heart attacks or strokes over the next 30 years were 36% higher in women with the highest levels of LDL-C, 70% higher in women with the highest levels of hsCRP, and 33% higher in those with the highest levels of lipoprotein(a).

Women in whom all three markers were in the highest range were 2.6 times more likely to have a major cardiovascular event and 3.7 times more likely to have a stroke over the next three decades, according to a report of the study in The New England Journal of Medicine published to coincide with the presentation at the meeting.

“The three biomarkers are fully independent of each other and tell us about different biologic issues each individual woman faces,” Ridker said.

“The therapies we might use in response to an elevation in each biomarker are markedly different, and physicians can now specifically target the individual person’s biologic problem.”

While drugs that lower LDL-C and hsCRP are widely available - including statins and certain pills for high blood pressure and heart failure - drugs that reduce lipoprotein(a) levels are still in development by companies, including Novartis , Amgen , Eli Lilly and London-based Silence Therapeutics.

In some cases, lifestyle changes such as exercising and quitting smoking can be helpful.

Most of the women in the study were white Americans, but the findings would likely “have even greater impact among Black and Hispanic women for whom there is even a higher prevalence of undetected and untreated inflammation,” Ridker said.

“This is a global problem,” he added. “We need universal screening for hsCRP ... and for lipoprotein(a), just as we already have universal screening for cholesterol.”