When most individuals think about an asteroid, they consider catastrophe: extinction stage occasions that blot out the solar and exterminate entire evolutionary strains. In popular culture, asteroids are each a bodily manifestation of chaos past human management and a vector for heroism — “Armageddon” (1998) depicts our courageous protagonists making an attempt to cease an impending influence, whereas within the newer “Don’t Look Up” (2021), the physique careening towards Earth capabilities as an apt stand-in for our personal floundering within the face of local weather change. The asteroid of our imaginations is nearly all the time a fist, menacingly swinging towards Earth by means of the darkish void of house: By the point you see it, it’s too late.In “The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Daybreak of our Photo voltaic System,” Dante S. Lauretta begins with the asteroid-as-menace, too. As principal investigator of NASA’s (deep breath) Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Useful resource Identification, and Safety-Regolith Explorer (blessedly identified by its catchier acronym, OSIRIS-REx), Lauretta begins with a prologue devoted to the harmful potential of his mission’s quarry, a near-Earth asteroid referred to as Bennu. If an asteroid might sue for libel, Bennu would have a case: Lauretta tells us Bennu is a freight prepare, a bomb, a bringer of earthquakes, hurricane-force winds, and ear-shattering blast waves. It’s a veritable hand of god, looming in orbit close to our planet, able to destroying life as we all know it.Lauretta’s not mistaken, after all — nor does this villainous portrait of Bennu come as a shock. Close to-Earth asteroids are a significant safety concern, and plenty of billions of {dollars} have gone to funding ever extra cautious inventories and research of those stealthy house rocks. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft had a very bold mission: Launched in 2016, it flew out to Bennu, and spent two years finding out this probably hazardous asteroid up shut, earlier than accumulating a pattern of Bennu’s treasured grime and sending it again to Earth (the place it landed safely late final yr). Guaranteeing that humanity doesn’t actually go the best way of the dinosaurs is a significant motivator for funding asteroid analysis, and rightly so. In framing the story of the OSIRIS-REx mission when it comes to planetary security, Lauretta treads acquainted floor: The mission staff turns into our band of heroes, struggling by means of funding denials, gear challenges and a goal with various surprises inside its rocky confines.This muscular story of bravado and conquest is the story one expects from “The Asteroid Hunter,” nevertheless it isn’t probably the most fascinating story within the e-book. As a substitute, what makes Lauretta’s memoir compelling is the vein of fragility that runs by means of it. It’s a thread that first seems within the e-book’s “interludes,” brief fictional interstitials that inform of two carbon atoms — one part of the tremendous gravel of Bennu’s regolith, the opposite a part of the writer himself — born collectively however separated by cosmic vicissitude till OSIRIS-REx reunites them. Whereas these interludes are solely transient moments in a story that covers greater than three a long time in Lauretta’s life (and billions of miles for the OSIRIS-REx mission) they convey deep fact: that human beings, and every little thing we all know and discover acquainted, had been as soon as infinitesimally small atoms cast within the hearts of long-dead stars, and that our origins are basically the identical as seemingly alien, unimaginably distant rocks in house. At some basic stage, then, the hunter and the prey are one and the identical. In these interludes, Lauretta delicately units up the lengthy chain of probability that brings these two particles collectively once more.We’re used to downing tales of house exploration that come to us like stiff drinks, served neat, redolent with the excessive ester aromas of machismo. This can be a consequence not solely of gender imbalance in science, however of the emphasis on energy and resilience that’s typically used to guarantee funding companies and taxpayers that their {dollars} are being put to good use. Readers interested in how house missions go from concept to liftoff will recognize listening to concerning the unimaginable quantity of forethought, creativity and battle-testing that spacecraft and the many individuals who handle them (typically lots of of them, over a mission’s lifetime) need to undergo. And definitely, the success of the OSIRIS-REx mission has been made doable by the large power of human labor and grit.Having mentioned that, the unknown stays the gremlin within the gears: OSIRIS-REx arrives in orbit round Bennu solely to search out itself in a peppery mist of stones unexpectedly ejected from the asteroid’s floor. It seems to be extra a pile of loosely certain rubble than a single intransigent block, flaking like a saltine on the slightest contact. Very like best-laid plans, its solidity is an phantasm. In some unspecified time in the future, the stolid scientific bravado falls away, even when nearly every little thing works out, an expertise that Lauretta captures with readability.Alongside the trail to OSIRIS-REx reaching Bennu and bringing its scientific bounty house, readers study of different house missions that faltered or had been foiled by the unforeseeable. Trying to these failures, even the steeliest scientist feels nauseous worry for their very own work, but in addition understands them as a chance to study classes that may guarantee their very own mission’s success. Nonetheless, not each mistake is a lesson — typically, issues merely don’t go in response to plan. Even after OSIRIS-REx returned its pattern house final September, a wild success by any measure, the mission staff discovered its investigation stymied when its pattern assortment case spent its first three months again on Earth caught shut like an uncooperative pickle jar earlier than the staff might lastly retrieve its treasured contents.Positive, finding out asteroids like Bennu might help us higher perceive tips on how to deal with a possible influence, however, once more, that’s hardly the actual story right here. Quite, the standard pebbles that the staff lastly unboxed are a time machine to the very beginnings of our photo voltaic system, the widespread origin we share not solely with different dwelling issues, however with every little thing that exists in our nook of the cosmos, alive or not. Whereas meteorites routinely land on our planet, they’re remodeled by the large warmth of blazing by means of Earth’s environment, and additional modified by the atmosphere of our planet. In contrast, OSIRIS-REx ferried Bennu’s dusky carbon silt again unaltered, nonetheless bearing the traces of what our photo voltaic system was like when life was getting began right here on Earth.We don’t but understand how precisely life on Earth started. We do, nonetheless, know that humanity, and all of the life we see round us, is constructed on a posh scaffolding of carbon atoms, these sociable little particles that bond to at least one one other so properly. Presumably, sooner or later, there was each probability and fragility within the course of, an intersection of potentialities that discovered success, the place there had been solely failure earlier than. And typically, as was the case when a younger Lauretta opened a pupil newspaper to see an advert that learn “WORK FOR NASA,” the whole arc of the universe will be modified in a single, delicate second.Lucianne Walkowicz is an astronomer, motion artist and educator primarily based in Chicago.A Scientist’s Journey to the Daybreak of our Photo voltaic SystemGrand Central. 320 pp. $30