LAURETTA, Dante S.
The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist's Journey to the Dawn of Our Solar System.
New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024.
$600.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152462
+$500
First Edition of The Asteroid Hunter; Lengthily Signed by Dante S. Lauretta
First edition of the OSIRIS-REx mission leader’s firsthand account of the daring NASA voyage to retrieve a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Octavo, original publisher’s boards. Boldly signed by the author on the half-title page with an autograph quotation, “Long ago, two carbon atoms were born entangled in the heart of a star. Dante.” Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Caitlin Sacks. A desirable signed copy.
The Asteroid Hunter is planetary scientist Dante S. Lauretta’s firsthand account of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, the ambitious effort he led to travel to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, collect a sample of its ancient material, and return it to Earth. Launched in 2016, the spacecraft reached Bennu in 2018, executed a delicate touch-and-go retrieval of surface material in 2020, and delivered its capsule of asteroid dust and rock to the Utah desert in September 2023, the first American mission ever to return a sample from an asteroid. Because such primitive bodies preserve material largely unchanged since the birth of the solar system, the samples offer scientists a window onto the origins of the planets and possibly of life itself. Lauretta is a Regents Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Arizona and served as the mission’s principal investigator, and his book weaves the science and suspense of the mission together with his own path from a restless youth to the leadership of one of the boldest planetary expeditions of the age.
The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist's Journey to the Dawn of Our Solar System.
$600.00
In Stock