NASA on Wednesday gave the public a preview of what scientists found inside a sealed capsule that returned to Earth last month carrying samples of carbon-rich soil, including hydrated clay minerals, dredged from the asteroid’s surface.
A small amount of material collected by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu was unveiled in an auditorium at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston three years ago, after the spacecraft landed in the Utah desert for two weeks. more.
The capsule’s landing capped a seven-year joint mission between NASA and the University of Arizona. This is the third asteroid sample to be returned to Earth for analysis after two similar missions by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in 2010 and 2020, and is also the largest to date.
“Days like this continue to amaze me,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on stage as he introduced on a screen the first images of material retrieved from Bennu, a roughly Celestial artifact 4.5 billion years old.
The images show that as the asteroid’s soil was sucked through a filter into the spacecraft’s storage tank, a loose pile of small, charcoal-colored rocks, pebbles and dust was left on the outside of the sample collection assembly.
Technicians are still methodically dismantling the hardware around the internal science canister that holds most of the specimens, a process expected to take another two weeks.
But “additional” samples of the spilled material were immediately examined using electron microscopes and X-ray instruments, said Dante Lauretta, principal mission researcher at the University of Arizona.
What they found, Lauretta said, was a substance rich in carbon, containing nearly 5 percent by weight of the element necessary for all life on Earth, and with water molecules locked into the crystalline structure of the clay fibers.
Scientists also found iron minerals in the form of iron sulfide and iron oxide, “which themselves suggest they formed in a water-rich environment,” Lauretta said at a later news conference.
Daniel Glavine, senior sample scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said early analysis found the material appeared to be “rich in organic matter.”
The preliminary findings suggest there may be further discoveries to support the hypothesis that early Earth was seeded with the primitive ingredients for life by impacts on the young planet by objects such as comets, asteroids and meteorites.
ancient rubble pile
Bennu was discovered in 1999 and is described by scientists as a relatively loose mass of rocky material, like a pile of gravel, held together by gravity. It is about three-tenths of a mile (500 meters) in diameter, slightly wider than the Empire State Building, but taller and taller than the Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth about 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. Small.
Like other asteroids, Bennu is a remnant of the early solar system. Because its current chemistry and mineralogy have changed little since its formation, it holds clues to the origin and development of rocky planets like Earth and could become central to astrobiological research.
The capsule was initially inspected at the Utah Test and Training Range near the landing site and then flown to Houston where it was carefully inspected in a purpose-built “clean room” within Johnson Space Center’s Astromaterial Management Facility.
Over the next few months, the entire asteroid sample will be broken into smaller samples and promised to be made available to about 200 scientists in 60 labs around the world.
At the time of landing, the Bennu sample was estimated to have weighed about 250 grams (8.8 ounces), well above the minimum weight of 60 grams (2 ounces) scientists hoped to collect. More precise measurements will be taken a few weeks later, once the jars are fully opened and all contents weighed.
OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016 and reached Bennu in 2018, then spent nearly two years orbiting it before venturing close enough on October 20, 2020 to grab a piece of loose surface material with a robotic arm. sample.
Preliminary analyzes of the first samples show that orbital observations of the asteroid “predict the mineralogy very accurately,” Lauretta said.
NASA will launch a separate mission on Thursday to a more distant asteroid called Psyche, a metal-rich object believed to be the remnant core of a protoplanet and the centerpiece of our solar system The largest known metal object in .
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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