A capsule bearing soil from an asteroid situated 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 The area rock is estimated to be round 4.5 billion years outdated — that means it fashioned across the identical time because the photo voltaic system and certain holds pre-solar materials, in addition to amino acids, the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 staff linked it to a 100-foot cable dangling from a helicopter for transport to a short lived 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.
Elements of the pattern will then be shipped to different analysis labs, and a few can even be preserved for future generations of scientists to check — just like how right now’s researchers nonetheless research 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 consider that materials from asteroids like Bennu deposited compounds similar to 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, informed Vox. “We hope the Bennu samples will assist us deal with the query, ‘Which constructing blocks have been delivered by meteorites?’”
Even additional again, Bennu may inform scientists about how planets, together with Earth, fashioned 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, informed Area.com in July.
The asteroid pattern — referred to as a regolith — is the primary ever introduced again to Earth by a US staff. Japan’s area company led a mission that returned a pattern from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020, which yielded vital scientific data 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 might be sufficient not just for right now’s cosmochemists to check the make-up of Bennu, but additionally for scientists for years and even many years to return, who might be “capable of deal with science questions that we can’t even ask right now,” Heck mentioned. “That’s actually the ability of pattern return.”
Bennu is constituted of most of the identical supplies as meteorites that sometimes slam into Earth — which scientists discover vital to check, too, as a result of they might help us perceive what existed on the daybreak of the photo voltaic system. However in these pure experiments, it’s tough to differentiate 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 drawback, the Bennu pattern was gathered instantly from the asteroid and thoroughly sealed to keep away from alteration by outdoors supplies, even as soon as it arrived on Earth.
Bennu was chosen for the OSIRIS-REx mission 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 great alternative to fly to Bennu with an inexpensive funding in propulsion,” Heck mentioned. “You don’t need to go to an asteroid that’s too distant, 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 mentioned, 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] sooner or later be on a collision course with Earth,” he informed Vox. “We’d have a greater approach to determine the right way to deflect it, if we all know what it’s manufactured from.”
Heck expects that materials from the pattern will arrive to his analysis staff in Chicago for research later this yr. “Our labs are prepared for it,” he mentioned.
