Enlarge / A look inside the clean room where OSIRIS-REx's samples will be stored. (credit: NASA) Christmas Day for scientists who study asteroids is coming in just two months when a small spacecraft carrying material from a distant rubble pile will land in a Utah desert. The return of the OSIRIS-REx sample container on September 24 will cap the primary mission to capture material from an asteroid—in this case, the carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid Bennu—and return some of its pebbles and dust to Earth. It has been a long time coming.