NASA’s first asteroid sample is the cleanest of its kind.
Now, back on Earth, samples taken from the asteroid Bennu are already yielding surprising discoveries about the early solar system and where asteroids came from.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft dropped rock and soil samples from the pristine asteroid into the Utah desert last year after a seven-year round-trip journey to the asteroid Bennu.
It took a while to carefully remove the lid from the sample container, but the first asteroid fragments they extracted were also rich in carbon, an element essential for all life on Earth.
Scientists from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample analysis team have released their initial findings on the Bennu sample.
They say they have discovered an organic compound.
The samples also contained a surprising substance called sodium magnesium phosphate, although the spacecraft’s imaging team was unable to see it in the asteroid’s spectral data.
OSIRIS-REx spent several years mapping the asteroid before its touch-and-go maneuver to collect a sample.
Humberto Campins, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Central Florida who served as part of the OSIRIS-REx science team during the mission, said the team hoped to find hydrated minerals, or minerals that react with water.
“But magnesium sodium phosphate is the result of a hydration process, which indicates that very complex fluids, reactions and chemistry occurred in Bennu’s parent body,” said Campins, who was not involved in the new study. “We don’t know yet, and this detailed study will tell us a lot more about what was going on in the parent body.”
The findings suggest that Bennu’s parent planet may have been a watery planet.
“The presence and state of phosphates on Bennu, as well as other elements and compounds, suggest that this asteroid was once rich in water,” said Dante Lauretta, co-lead author of the paper and OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Bennu may have once been part of a wetter world, although this hypothesis requires further investigation.”
Bennu’s wonders are just beginning
The latest discovery is further evidence that the OSRIS-REx team picked the right asteroid to bring debris back to Earth, and NASA says the sample analysis team is finding something new every week.
Discoveries from Bennu may soon become a global science initiative.
Dozens of laboratories across the US and around the world are set to receive samples from Bennu from NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Campins said the samples’ return to Earth would lead to even more research and discoveries.
“The next few years are going to be very interesting,” Campins said. “We’re starting to get new perspectives, new data sets to understand the most primitive materials in the solar system, materials that probably have implications for the origin of water on Earth, the origin of organic molecules on Earth, which was a big motivation for this mission.”
Obtaining a pristine sample of a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid, unaffected by Earth’s atmosphere and other contaminants, could help scientists answer key questions about how life on Earth formed.
Campins said Bennu could help answer the key question of what “the steps were between the most complex organic molecules and the first living cells.”
The spacecraft is operating under a new name and a new mission.
The new OSIRIS-APEX mission will study the asteroid Apophis when it approaches Earth in 2029, close enough that the asteroid will be visible from Earth without the use of a telescope.
