Following him, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta showed four more detailed images of the sample taken with an electron microscope and spoke further about the importance of carbon. He described the material as a clay mineral with water trapped within a fibrous, serpentine crystal structure. “We think this is how water got to Earth. The reason Earth is a habitable world, the reason we have oceans and lakes and rain, is because these clay minerals “Because they landed on Earth 4.5 billion years ago and made our world habitable,” he said. “[And] It is possible that not only Earth, but also Venus and Mars, had water in the early days of the solar system.
As he flipped through the images, he showed that some of the material had a hexagonal shape, a characteristic of sulfur, which he said is important for biology. “Many of the amino acids that give structure to our cells use sulfur,” he said. He also showed images of both framboidal (raspberry-shaped) and platy magnetite fragments. “Those platelets may be important for the evolution of organisms. They may catalyze certain reactions,” he said.
Next, OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead Daniel Glavin showed what happens when particles of asteroid material are viewed under ultraviolet light. Under the light, the sample was bright blue, dotted with small white bright spots, which he likened to stars. “The object is glowing,” he said, explaining that the fluorescence indicates carbonate minerals. “This is an organic material called organic globules. This has a lot of organic in it.”
The talk also included a prerecorded video of curatorial scientist Nicole Lanning standing outside a specially constructed clean room in Building 31 at Johnson Space Center. The building is already home to the world’s largest collection of asteroid material and will serve as a permanent home for astronauts. Bennu sample. Because organic matter is such a focus for this mission, the cleanroom was specifically designed to avoid contaminating the samples with biological material from Earth, Lanning said.
Lunning said much of the material was fine dust and intermediate-sized particles the size of short-grain rice. He noted that so far NASA has only tested a small portion of the sample and has not yet fully opened the sample container. He said he plans to continue disassembling the collection head and dividing the sample into handling trays that “look like deep-dish pizza pans.” She said the agency plans to release a catalog within six months to give scientists the opportunity to propose research and request samples. About 230 scientists around the world worked on the analysis for two years, she said, and some of the material will be on display to the public at the Smithsonian Institution, Space Center Houston and the University of Arizona.
