The powdery substance released by NASA officials on Wednesday looked like asphalt or charcoal, but it was worth well over its weight in diamonds. The debris is from a unique world: fragments of the asteroid Bennu were collected and returned to Earth for analysis by the OSIRIS-REx mission. The sample contains chemical clues about the formation of the solar system and the origin of the water that supports life on Earth.
The clays and minerals of the 4.5 billion-year-old rock have been preserved in the polar freeze of space since the birth of the solar system. Last month, after a seven-year space mission, they parachuted into the Utah desert and were whisked away by helicopter.
And now these pure substances are stored in airtight containers in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where researchers like Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, are the first to study the samples up close. I’m getting an opportunity.
By September 27, “the electron microscope was turned on and ready to go,” Lauretta said at a press conference. “And it worked really well.” (Principal Investigator Lauretta named the mission an acronym for Origin, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security Regolith Explorer.) A small portion of the sample Preliminary investigations revealed that the samples were rich in water, carbon, and carbon. organic compound.
Carbon is essential to all life on Earth, forming chemical bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements needed to build proteins and enzymes. “We’re looking at types of minerals that may have played an important role in the origin of life on Earth,” Lauretta said.
The Bennu sample contained about 4.7 percent carbon, as measured by the Carnegie Institution for Science, said Daniel Glavin, OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This is the “highest carbon abundance” the Carnegie team has ever measured in an extraterrestrial sample, Glavine said. “There were some scientists on the team who were like, ‘Wow, my God!’ And when the scientists said, ‘Wow,’ that’s a big deal.” ”
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Bennu’s sample also contained organic compounds that, when exposed to black light, glowed like tiny stars in the dark sample. “We picked the right asteroid, and not only did we pick the right asteroid, but we brought back the right sample,” Glavin said. “This is an astrobiologist’s dream.”
Asteroids like Bennu are most likely responsible for all of Earth’s wet topography, and the water in our oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain probably formed around 4 billion years ago when space rocks formed on this young planet. This is what I arrived at when I landed on . Bennu has a water-bearing clay with a fibrous structure, which Lauretta says was an important transport material for H.2Oh, Earth.
When magnified, the clay has a sinuous shape. “We call these serpentines because they look like snakes or snakes in the sample and have water trapped within their crystalline structures,” he said. “That’s how we think water got to Earth.”
This is just the beginning. The OSIRIS-REx science team will spend several months doing more detailed work cataloging the samples. We will publish the catalog in 6 months. Scientists around the world will be able to propose research using the material, but more than half of the samples will be preserved for research years or decades later.
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They have over half a pound of material to work with. OSIRIS-REx retrieved estimates 250 grams Bennu’s material was more than four times the mission’s target of 60 grams. And when the science team began disassembling the sample return capsule at Johnson Space Center, they discovered what NASA is calling it. bonus material: Fragments of Bennu stuck to the collector head and lid of the sealed canister that brought back most of the sample.
“The first thing we noticed was that there was black dust and particles all over the outside edge,” Lauretta said. “This is already a scientific treasure.”
