A capsule bearing soil from an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth landed in Utah at 8:52 am Mountain time Sunday, bringing with it — scientists hope — details about the origin of life.
The NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Useful resource Identification, Safety-Regolith Explorer, delivered a pattern of fabric from the asteroid Bennu. The area rock is estimated to be round 4.5 billion years outdated — that means it shaped across the identical time because the photo voltaic system and certain holds pre-solar materials, in addition to amino acids, the constructing blocks of life.
Seven years after its preliminary launch, OSIRIS-REx deposited the capsule of uncontaminated materials from Bennu to the Division of Protection’s Utah Check and Coaching Vary, about 80 miles from Salt Lake Metropolis, earlier than heading off on one other mission, this time to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis.
What Bennu can inform us about a few of life’s greatest questions
After the pattern landed, the OSIRIS-REx crew related the pattern to a 100-foot cable dangling from a helicopter for transport to a brief clear room, free from contaminants within the Earth’s environment, the place it is going to be preserved with nitrogen after which transported to Johnson Area Middle in Houston.
Components of the pattern will then be shipped to different analysis labs, and a few may also be preserved for future generations of scientists to review — much like how immediately’s researchers nonetheless examine samples of fabric from the moon introduced again many years in the past on Apollo 11, humanity’s first moon touchdown.
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Researchers imagine that materials from asteroids like Bennu deposited compounds like amino acids on Earth earlier than life existed on this planet, Philipp Heck, senior director of analysis and curator of meteoritics and polar research at Chicago’s Area Museum, instructed Vox. “We hope the Bennu samples will assist us handle the query, ‘Which constructing blocks have been delivered by meteorites?’”
Even additional again, Bennu may inform scientists about how planets, together with Earth, shaped within the first place. “Asteroids are [leftover] rocky materials from the time of the photo voltaic system formation. They’re the preliminary bricks that constructed the planets,” Fred Jourdan, a planetary scientist at Curtin College in Perth, Australia, instructed Area.com in July.
The asteroid pattern — known as a regolith — is the primary ever introduced again to Earth by a US crew. Japan’s area company led a mission that returned a pattern from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020, which yielded vital scientific info however was pretty small, limiting its utility. The Bennu pattern is between 5.26 and 12.34 ounces (149 to 350 grams), scientists estimated from monitoring the amassing mechanism aboard the spacecraft.
That can be sufficient not just for immediately’s cosmochemists to review the make-up of Bennu, but additionally for scientists for years and even many years to return, who can be “capable of handle science questions that we can not even ask immediately,” Heck stated. “That’s actually the ability of pattern return.”
Bennu is created from lots of the identical supplies as meteorites that often slam into Earth — which scientists discover vital to review, too, as a result of they can assist us perceive what existed on the daybreak of the photo voltaic system. However in these pure experiments, it’s troublesome to tell apart what was already current within the meteorites’ materials from what was deposited after they entered Earth’s environment and biosphere, Heck defined. To keep away from this downside, the Bennu pattern was gathered immediately from the asteroid and thoroughly sealed to keep away from alteration by exterior supplies, even as soon as it arrived on Earth.
Bennu was chosen for the OSIRIS-REx undertaking due to its composition — which scientists may decide from observing the asteroid from a distance, in addition to research of comparable area rocks — but additionally as a result of it’s comparatively near Earth. “Each six years, Earth overtakes Bennu…so it’s a very good alternative to fly to Bennu with an affordable funding in propulsion,” Heck stated. “You don’t wish to go to an asteroid that’s too far-off, then come again — it simply prices a lot extra money to have a spacecraft that may try this.”
As a result of it’s a near-Earth asteroid, there’s additionally “non-zero likelihood” that Bennu may hit Earth, Heck stated, though that wouldn’t occur this century. “That was one other motivation, to get to know the properties and the build-up of Bennu in case one thing like Bennu, [could] in some unspecified time in the future be on a collision course with Earth,” he instructed Vox. “We might have a greater method to determine the right way to deflect it, if we all know what it’s fabricated from.”
Heck expects that materials from the pattern will arrive to his analysis crew in Chicago for examine later this yr. “Our labs are prepared for it,” he stated.
