It made history in the span of approximately six seconds. On Tuesday afternoon, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully completed its touch-and-go meeting with 101955 Bennu. In the process, it managed to collect a sample of regolith it will now carry back to Earth for scientists to examine. Today, we get to see how that maneuver looked from OSIRIS-REx’s perspective, with NASA sharing a series of 82 images from the craft’s SamCam imaging tool.

According to NASA, the images document approximately five minutes of OSIRIS-REx’s descent toward Bennu, including the moment it came into contact with the planetoid. Throughout the series, OSIRIS-REx’s aptly

The $800 million OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission is being led by Dante Lauretta, Professor of Planetary Science and Cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and aims to further our understanding of how the early Solar System formed.

Class-B asteroids like Bennu serve as time capsules of a sort. “Asteroids are leftovers formed from the cloud of gas and dust -- the solar nebula -- that collapsed to form our sun and the planets about 4.5 billion years ago,” NASA’s Dwayne Brown wrote in 2011. “As such, they contain the