(upbeat music) Tom - This week on Arizona Illustrated, the importance of weaving to the Navajo people.

Barbara - Everything has a story on the loom.

They have a sky beam, the earth beam, the night and the day where the cloud comes in, where it's a very fertile ground.

That's where the thoughts of your pattern comes from.

Tom - And the OSIRIS-REx mission returns it's sample of asteroid Bennu back to Earth.

Dante - And I think we need to appreciate that this is a gift that we've been given.

Be alive, be conscious on this beautiful world.

To have all of these capabilities, to learn about our place in the cosmos, to wonder about it.

You know, they call it the overview effect.

You see the world from space, scale and everything.

The earth seems really big, it looks so tiny.

(upbeat music) Tom - Hello and welcome to an all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And we're joining you from the Michael Drake Building, which is part of the University of Arizona.

We'll have more on him and the OSIRIS-REx mission he helped pioneer later in the show.

But for now, here's a story on two sisters, both masters of Navajo weaving.

They'll tell us how the weaving goddess Spider Woman bestowed on the Navajos the gift of weaving and how it's helped them survive some of their darkest hours.

We'll also meet the emerging new generation of Navajo weavers at the Heard Museum.

(soft music) (Barbara) When you look at me, you see my weavings.

And if you look at my weavings, you see me.

My whole life is Navajo weaving.

I tried other things.

Weaving was always a calling.

[Speaking Navajo language] Hi, my name is Barbara Teller Ornelas I'm the Edgewater people, born for water that flows together.

My grandfather's people are one who walks around and Red Bottoms Clan.

I'm of the Navajo tribe.

I come from Two Grey Hills, New Mexico, and my parents are Sam and Ruth Teller.

This is who I am.

(Lynda) As we sit down at our looms, we're actually sitting down at the universe because our loom parts are representative of our whole universe.

My name is Lynda Teller Pete, and I'm a Navajo weaver.

Every weaver has their own skill about how they work.

The lessons from Spider Woman is you take your talents and you work with those talents to be the best weaver you can be.

(Barbara) I think I started weaving when I was around five or six years old.

I am the fifth generation weaver in my family.

I learned the stories, the songs, the prayers from my grandmother, Nellie Teller.

I learned the basic weaving from my mother, and I learned the techniques and designs and troubleshooting from my sister, Roseanne.

(Lynda) Weaving is important because it was a gift to us from one of our holy people.

Spider Woman was tasked to weave a map of the universe.

Her husband, Spider Man, built the loom, fashioned the tools.

Between the two of them, working as partners, they gave the Navajo people the gift of weaving.

We enjoy life because we are teaching our own people to weave.

And we're helping them find their lost linkages.

(Brittany) My grandmother was a weaver, so she would put me to sleep just weaving.

And I wake up and she's still weaving.

Weaving means that I get to be with my grandma again.

I lost my grandmother to Alzheimer's and dementia.

I didn't get her traditional knowledge of it.

(Sue) Weaving means to me, I have to be patient.

I need to slow down.

I need to enjoy life.

It grounds me.

Back when I was growing up, you could finish a rug.

It was not a matter of someone being tired.

It was a matter of feeding your family for the day or the week.

So it's survival.

(Barbara) And it was always Navajo weaving that helped our people survive.

And then when the Navajos got rounded up and moved to Bosque Redondo to be to be prisoners of war.

they wove down there to sustain themselves.

After their imprisonment was over, they came back to the Navajo Nation.

All the crops were gone, all the animals were gone, all the houses were burnt.

but it was Navajo weaving that helped them restart their lives.

It's our job to pass it forward.

The women are more well known as Navajo weavers, but we've always had men weavers.

(Gary) Kind of nervous coming into it at first, but the two sisters, their style of teaching and everything is good, and they make you feel comfortable, and they really walk you through step by step.

This is my very first rug.

They call it like a Chief style, a popular design among the Navajos.

You're learning patience and how to work through troubles.

(Crystal) I come from generations of weavers.

For my line of work for the Navajo Cultural Arts Program, we produce emerging artists in weaving, moccasin making, silversmithing, pottery, basketry.

I'm actually a silversmith, so I'm hoping to relearn the whole weaving techniques and start to weave again.

(Barbara) And then this piece I did when I was 10.

Yeah, a trader gave it back to me.

I sold this piece for $10 and a bag of candy.

Yeah, and the trader gave it back to me.

He goes, "You need to keep this."

My father was a trader at Two Grey Hills Trading Post for about 35 years, so I grew up at the store where these weavings come from.

And Two Grey Hills is geometric, two diamonds, the colors are all natural colors.

I weave other styles, but if I feel like I need to go home, I do a Two Grey.

So that's better.

This one of her pieces.

that I keep laugh (Lynda) We got pigeonholed when we were young about using The Two Gray Hill style of weaving.

I really wanted to branch out and introduce some color into my weaving.

In my work, I'll tell stories about the long walk when our people got sent to Bosque Redondo (soft music) - I am now doing a series of women's mantas.

I try to plan, but my plans do go awry sometimes when I am influenced by beautiful colors.

(Christy) I decided to weave the rug with the colors, blue and purple and pink, because I wanted to represent bisexual people in the rug design.

There's just a lot of bisexual erasure that goes on in the LGBTQ community.

(soft music) (Barbara) Everything has a story on the loom.

(soft music) (Nature Desert sound birds chirping) They have a sky beam.

(Nature Desert sound foot steps on dirt) The Earth beam.

(Desert night sound, Insects, Sequoia) (Desert day sound, Freeway, Car drives near) The Night and the Day.

(Desert evening sound, cloud swell moving) where the fog comes in, where it's a very fertile ground.

(Desert day sound, sheep bleating) That's where the thoughts of your pattern comes from.

(Desert evening sound, thunder, rain) [MUSIC] The warp string represents rain.

(Rain drops pouring down) There's a female rain and a male rain.

Male and the female go back and forth between each other and you're weaving those in between.

(gentle music) (Lynda) When you get to a certain level in your art, you have a responsibility to give back.

For us, it's doing classes like this with the Heard Museum, where all of our students are Native.

We get to hear their stories, and we get to hear about their grandmothers, and their mothers, and how they're so proud of their weavings.

I go home with a full heart, because I've given the gift that I receive to them, and they get to keep on giving.

The gift goes on.

(Desert day sound, wind gust and sheep bleating) (Barbara) We take the wool from the sheep.

We dry the lanolin out of the wool.

We wash the wool, card the wool.

You just cross card to get different colors, like you mix brown and white to get light browns.

The only thing we dye is a black, and then everything's done by hand.

I was picked as an ambassador for Navajo weaving during the Obama years.

We travel all over the Navajo reservation.

We found elder weavers, prime weavers, we found weavers that are just getting started and young weavers.

So this book is the very first book that's been written by Navajo weavers about Navajo weavers.

My sister and I started teaching weaving 25 years ago.

When we first started out, we had just had a small list of things 20 years later.

We ended up with like maybe 40 pages.

We turned our instruction papers into a book.

(soft music) (Ethel) My mother is a weaver, my grandmother is a weaver, and my great-grandmothers are all weavers.

Our line, it doesn't weave, so my daughter and I, we both signed up, so we're both learning together.

(Michelle) My grandma was a weaver, and she didn't really pass that down to my mom, and so we're kind of trying to reinvigorate and learn this culture together.

Everybody's saying that weaving is a dying art, that makes me really sad.

So it's very important for the cultural preservation.

I flew all the way out from Seattle to be here just to learn this.

I feel really thankful that the Heard Museum is sponsoring this.

[Music] (Barbara) Through all the years I've been a weaver and I've been a Weaver over 50 years.

My greatest accomplishment is doing what I'm doing now, teaching Navajo students the art of weaving.

Beacause it's their birth right.

This building is named after the late famed professor, Michael J. Drake.

And among his many accomplishments, well, he pioneered the OSIRIS-REx mission, NASA's first attempt to bring a piece of an asteroid back to Earth.

Now we've been following that mission since its inception back in the early 2000s.

And after about 20 years of waiting, well, the spacecraft brought a sample of asteroid Bennu back to Earth on September 24th.

Our cameras were in the Utah desert where the sample came searing back through our planet's atmosphere.

And we captured every pulse-pounding moment of its long-awaited arrival, which should reveal secrets of how our solar system formed and about the origins of life on Earth.

Welcome, and thank you for joining us live from the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Dugway, Utah.

This is special coverage of America's first asteroid sample return mission OSIRIS-REx as it arrives back to Earth after more than seven years traveling in deep space.

Let's turn it over to our mission commentator James Tralie, to take us through the final moments.

James, we're all yours.

Yeah Lauren buckle up and get ready for the ride of entry, descent and landing.

In just a few moments, we're going to hit that key milestone of punishing descent through Earth's atmosphere to us here in the Utah Test and Training Range.

[Announcer] Mission milestone: The SRC has entered the Earth atmosphere.

Tracking assets are acquired.

[James] And here we go.

This is from our infrared tracking camera on the WB 57 our high altitude plane.

Getting a great view of that SRC heating up as it comes in at about 27,650 miles an hour.

You can see it glowing brightly in the sky Very quickly in We're going to deploy our drogue parachute.

This is for stability, stabilizes our descent and makes sure that we are continuing to target that landing elipse.

[Announcer] Expected milestone: SRC commands drogue parachute deploy.

[James] So we heard that command to deploy the drogue parachute, waiting to see that visual confirmation.

Still quite warm, that fireball that literally was a ball of plasma just a few moments ago when it first entered into the Earth's atmosphere.

We continue to track with our high altitude camera here.

[Dante] The only thing that I needed to know was that that parachute deployed.

So obviously, I was keyed into that more than anything.

I've had a lot of heart pounding moments.

I often ask myself, how many can you handle in one lifetime?

Right?

It's like, I think I might be hitting my limit here.

[Announcer] Status check.

Go, Alice, Go Centaur.

Go OSIRIS-REx.

10 seconds.

Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

And liftoff of OSIRIS-REx.

It's seven year mission to boldly go to the asteroid Bennu and back.

[Dante] For the actual launch it was just transcendental.

It was a true out-of-body experience.

It was like I was there with OSIRIS-REx as we lifted off, you know, into the stratosphere, into orbit.

And then that final burn which sent us off into the solar system, and I was like, fare thee well.

Man, you know, we've got an adventure ahead of us, it's just beginning [Announcer] Centaur is now orbital.

[Dante] We've worked hard to get to this point.

The best times are ahead of us.

We are going to get to asteroid Bennu.

We're going to map it.

We're going to pick that site.

We're going to get that sample and we're going to bring it back to Earth.

[Carl] And then the moving dot here is actually the asteroid.

[Dante] Monday, December 3rd, 2018.

The spacecraft ends its approach to Bennu.

[Man] We have arrived.

[Dante] It's an amazing time right now.

The spacecraft is working, the camera is working.

Everything looks go to get into the science campaign.

So the winner of the OSIRIS-REx site selection championship is the Nightingale site.

(applause) We feel pretty good, everything is going really well today.

Earlier, we departed our orbit around the asteroid, so we're flying over the sunlit side of the asteroid.

The spacecraft has deployed its robotic TAGSAM sampling arm, so the arm is ready [Announcer] O-REx has descended below the five meter mark.

The hazard map is go for TAG.

Expected in 50 seconds.

[Dante] We're going in, we're going in!

[Woman] And we have touchdown!

[Dante] So Bennu has surprised us every step of the way.

And sure enough, we went down into the asteroid this deep.

We collected so much material, it was leaking and particles were just spewing out into space.

So one last emergency.

No worries.

We'll figure it out.

And we quickly got that sample stowed and tucked away into that capsule and closed up and ready for its journey home.

We want people to realize the impossible to see what you can do creatively, constructively, when people come together.

[Lauren] We are here at the Utah Test and Training Range in less than an hour, a four and a half a billion year old piece of the ancient solar system will be landing here in the desert.

For now, let's give you a quick geography lesson on where we are today.

We are sitting about 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in the heart of the Dugway Proving Ground, a historic Army facility.

The sample will touch down in our landing ellipse about 13 miles north of where we're speaking right now.

Mission teams have set up a clean room just one mile away from us, where the sample will end its journey today We've got a lot to discuss and a huge adventure straight ahead.

This is live coverage of NASA's [trails off] [Dante] The day actually starts really early in the morning.

And there's a critical decision at 2 a.m. Go, No Go?

Are we releasing the capsule or are we in a situation where we have to hang onto it and delay the sample return by two years?

Yeah, I voted go.

So that's on record.

PI is go.

But I don't get the safety vote.

And then there's a whole series of commands and operations that happen to the spacecraft ultimately releasing the capsule where it hits the top of the atmosphere about 4 hours later.

[James] Just a little bit north from us about 4 hours ago in Waterton, Colorado, the team met to assess the readiness to release the SRC from the main OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.

And I'm very happy to report that they gave the green light.

They gave the Go Command officially.

And in just a few moments, the SRC itself will be streaking across the skies as we begin to track it.

[Dante] That's when the field team activates.

We arrive here at the Michael Army Airfield and we get into our helicopters and we fly off to just outside what we called the landing ellipse.

And then we wait until we get confirmation that we can see the parachute opening up this is where the final endgame of OSIRIS-REx plays out.

[Lauren] So this is it.

We are just 15 minutes away from the OSIRIS-REx sample return: a journey of seven years and nearly 4 billion miles.

The work of thousands culminates in this moment [James] You see on the screen now the mission ops team eager at the edge of their seats for that first call out of Earth atmospheric entry.

Very exciting moment coming up in just a few seconds here.

[Announcer] Milestone: The SRC has entered the Earth's atmosphere Tracking assets are acquired.

[James] Start your stopwatch right now.

We have that expected milestone of entering into the Earth's atmosphere.

A phenomenal view of that streaking SRC coming in across the sky.

[Dante] At the end of the day, we know we've done the best job we can.

But the thing I worry about the most is we have to power up the sample return capsule, and there's a battery system on there which we haven't talked to, which releases the parachutes.

So if we try to power up the batteries and they're dead, we're throwing a dead capsule at the Earth.

[James] Our next milestone will be expecting that drogue parachute deployment.

Quite a challenge to track this as it comes searing in to atmosphere.

[Man] I can tell you what we expected to happen.

The drogue chute is commanded to deploy and then 360 seconds after the drogue, the main chute.

[Second Man] I could not see whether or not the drogue was deployed in the imagery that I had available in real time in the ops room.

[James] You can see our SRC, streaking in.

[Announcer] Mission milestone: We have confirmed parachute deployment.

[James] Wow!

And after an exhilarating streak across Earth's atmosphere, we have parachute deployment.

You can see just a sigh of relief from the team.

I can hear some applause here.

There is that orange creamsicle colored parachute.

Just a delight, a sweet delight to see in our skies here over the Utah Test and Training Range A phenomenal view.

Just wonderful to see that.

[Dante] I knew the moment the chute opened that was it.

It was overwhelming relief, gratitude, pride, awe, and really trying to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming.

And Touchdown of the OSIRIS REx Sample return capsule.

A journey of a billion miles to asteroid Bennu and back has come to an end.

And you can see now the SRC at last.

We have a visual of it on the surface of the Utah Test and Training Range and there is landing of our first helicopter at the site and the rest of the team is closely behind, ready to land at the recovery site to begin operations.

[Dante celebrates] Yeah!

It's good, huh?

Sitting straight up, parachute right next to it.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people to lay eyes on the capsule.

And, boy, did we stick that landing.

It was just sitting right there.

Oh, yeah, Look at that.

We think we've got a lot of sample in that in that science canister, and we can't wait to crack into it.

[Announcer] Recovery Operations: Helicopter one is cleared to depart the recovery site with the SRC.

[James] And it is off the desert terrain, in the air with the SRC in tow.

[Man] OREX on three: One, two, three.

[Everyone] OREX!

[James] This is the final leg of the journey of the SRC.

It has been loaded on the helicopter a few minutes ago.

And as we speak, team members are staged and waiting just outside that clean room, ready to get that SRC back on the ground once more.

[Dante] The key objective for me and one of the driving objectives of this program is to try to understand: did carbon rich asteroids like Bennu deliver the compounds that may have led to the origin of life on our planet, the origin of Earth as a habitable world?

I was there when it was nothing but a PowerPoint on a slide in a proposal that we were submitting to NASA with the dream that we were going to bring back samples from Bennu.

So it was amazing and emotional as incredible as it seemed all those years ago, it came to be.

(applause) [Dante] The Earth gravity assist was a great exercise for the team, so it was the first time everybody showed up here in Tucson because we were doing science operations here.

And so it just had that vibe.

Like all of a sudden everybody's here, we're excited, we're just getting ready for Bennu and this is just a dry run, a rehearsal to check out all of our instruments.

And then that picture of the Earth showed up on the screen.

and it was like a Carl Sagan moment.

It was like, you know, the pale blue, the famous, pale blue dot.

And it's, you know, you just see it.

It's like: that's us, right?

It's everybody on Earth that's in that one picture.

And you just realize how fragile it is, how beautiful it is, how rare it is.

And really, I wish everybody could have that moment because I think we would take better care of ourselves and our home world.

[Astronaut] Capsule is turning around.

Oh, that view is tremendous!

[Dante] And I think we need to appreciate that you know, this is a gift that we've been given, you know, to be alive, to be conscious on this beautiful world, to have all of these capabilities to learn about our place in the cosmos, to wonder about it.

You know, they call it the overview effect, right?

We see the world from space, the scale of everything.

The earth seems really big.

It looks so tiny when you see it like that.

Tom - Before we go here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

Alexsey - Yin Yoga is uncomfortable.

You feel like you're being pulled apart.

And I think sitting still and just being with yourself is very difficult for a lot of people.

And the doom metal being so plodding and repetitive, it's almost like an anchor that you can latch onto.

It builds mental resilience.

(Doom Metal music) Tom - Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week with another all new episode.