Excerpt from the linked content^1 by Rani Gran:

>NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is cruising back to Earth with a sample it collected from the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu.

>When its sample capsule parachutes down into the Utah desert on Sept. 24, OSIRIS-REx will become the United States’ first-ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth.

>After seven years in space, including a nail-biting touchdown on Bennu to gather dust and rocks, this intrepid mission is about to face one of its biggest challenges yet: deliver the asteroid sample to Earth while protecting it from heat, vibrations, and earthly contaminants.

>“Once the sample capsule touches down, our team will be racing against the clock to recover it and get it to the safety of a temporary clean room,” said Mike Moreau, deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

>So, over the next six months, the OSIRIS-REx team will practice and refine the procedures required to recover the sample in Utah and transport it to a new lab built for the material at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

>There, scientists will unpack the sample, distribute up to a quarter of it to the OSIRIS-REx science team around the world for analysis, and curate the rest for other scientists to study, now and in future generations.

^1 NASA prepares for historic asteroid sample delivery on Sept. 24, Rani Gran for NASA, 24 Mar. 2023, https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/nasa-prepares-for-osiris-rex-historic-asteroid-sample-delivery-sept-24-2023

Why is this labeled as the first time a US mission returns an asteroid sample?

I looked around a bit and it looks like nobody has done that yet. Was there a previous one I couldn't find?

The headline kind of implies that someone else did it first but I can't find anything to support that.

Yeah I’m pretty sure Japan did a few years ago and landed it in australia

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Japan's JAXA has done it twice. (But the first project returned very little.)

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/hayabusa-2/in-depth/

What happened to the first project the? I can't find anything about it.

Japan did it.

Thank you! I don't know why I had so much trouble finding that.

The Sample Return Mission wikipedia page is a good reference.

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The first Hayabusa spacecraft malfunctioned during the sample collection attempt. It did manage to return several tiny grains of dust from an asteroid despite the sample collection mechanism not operating. There is quite a bit of information about it at wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa

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Surprisingly it is the first for the US, but NASA has brought comet dust back with the Stardust Spacecraft. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_(spacecraft).

NEAR Shoemaker was a fun mission to read about also since it surprised people at NASA when they tried and successfully soft landed on the asteroid Eros at the end of the mission since it wasn’t designed to do that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEAR_Shoemaker

Japan has already done this.

Imagine if there is some metals or something that breaks the periodic table

Cyborg virus.

Maybe we find somthing cool, living or sleeping-living.