Utah Test and Training Range

The Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) is host to a variety of training and testing missions for the USAF, United States Army, and United States Marine Corps. The site is frequently used for the disposal of explosive ordnance, testing of experimental military equipment, as well as ground and air military training exercises. The UTTR works in close conjunction with Dugway Proving Ground (DPG) for military training exercises.[3]

OSIRIS-REx return capsule after landing at UTTR in 2023

The site has also been used as a landing site for sample return in NASA's planetary science missions, including comet material in the Stardust mission and the OSIRIS-REx mission to return material from asteroid (101955) Bennu.[4][5]

UTTR was also used as the landing site for the Genesis sample return mission. Although the sample return capsule's parachute failed to open and the capsule made a hard landing in the soft sandy soil, most of the collected scientific materials were salvaged. The solar wind particle collectors were made of wafers of aluminum, sapphire, silicon, germanium, gold and diamond-like amorphous carbon. When the capsule hit the desert floor, these wafers shattered into over 10,000 pieces of material. The Genesis team, along with the efforts of the USAF's Photographic and Engineering Technician team, set up a clean room at Dugway Proving Ground. NASA scientists spent months filtering through bent metal and shards of razor sharp material, each of the salvageable pieces of material going into its own small container where they were stored for a short time. Some weeks later, one of the lead scientists and the supervisor of the engineering technicians came upon what turned out to be the solar wind concentrator. Protected by a couple of aluminum braces and brackets, the concentrator had survived almost completely intact with only one small crack in one of its quadrants.[6][7][8]