Planetary scientist Dante Lauretta spent the last two decades pitching, preparing, and pondering a mission unlike one he or NASA had ever tried: OSIRIS-REx, the space agency’s first attempt at retrieving a sample from an asteroid.

Lauretta is now settling into his new role as an asteroid sample scientist. But way before that he began chronicling his epic career in a book. The Asteroid Hunter (on shelves now) takes readers through Lauretta’s out-of-this-world ventures, including the monumental effort it took to get a spacecraft off the ground, to an asteroid, back to Earth, and on to a new asteroid.

This month, Lauretta spoke to Inverse about the keystone to the entire mission, as well as what might be hiding inside the carbon-rich, ultra-dark asteroid samples.

While the metaverse might have faded into the background, thanks to Apple's Vision Pro, there’s still growing interest in the “spatial computing” and mixed reality (XR) experiences that are available today.

Meta and Apple are already in the game, and in early 2023, Samsung announced plans to release its own XR headset in partnership with Google and Qualcomm. Samsung is working on hardware, Google is developing a new version of Android for headsets, and Qualcomm is providing the processing power through the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset.

This isn’t Samsung’s first foray into virtual reality and headsets. As rumors and leaks start to fill in what the company’s Vision Pro competitor could look like, it’s worth considering what the company could learn from its first stab at a head-mounted display, the Gear VR.