But in those natural experiments, it’s difficult to distinguish what was already present in the meteorites’ material from what was deposited after they entered Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere, Heck explained. “That’s really the power of sample return.”īennu is made from many of the same materials as meteorites that occasionally slam into Earth - which scientists find important to study, too, because they can help us understand what existed at the dawn of the solar system. That will be enough not only for today’s cosmochemists to study the makeup of Bennu, but also for scientists for years and even decades to come, who will be “able to address science questions that we cannot even ask today,” Heck said. The Bennu sample is between 5.26 and 12.34 ounces (149 to 350 grams), scientists estimated from monitoring the collecting mechanism aboard the spacecraft. Japan’s space agency led a mission that returned a sample from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020, which yielded important scientific information but was fairly small, limiting its utility. The asteroid sample - called a regolith - is the first ever brought back to Earth by a US team. They are the initial bricks that built the planets,” Fred Jourdan, a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, told in July. “Asteroids are rocky material from the time of the solar system formation. “We hope the Bennu samples will help us address the question, ‘Which building blocks were delivered by meteorites?’”Įven further back, Bennu could tell scientists about how planets, including Earth, formed in the first place. Researchers believe that material from asteroids like Bennu deposited compounds such as amino acids on Earth before life existed on this planet, Philipp Heck, senior director of research and curator of meteoritics and polar studies at Chicago’s Field Museum, told Vox. A recovery team member examines the capsule containing the Bennu sample before it is taken to a temporary clean room. Parts of the sample will then be shipped to other research labs, and some will also be preserved for future generations of scientists to study - similar to how today’s researchers still study samples of material from the moon brought back decades ago on Apollo 11, humanity’s first moon landing. What Bennu can tell us about some of life’s biggest questionsĪfter the sample landed, the OSIRIS-REx team connected it to a 100-foot cable dangling from a helicopter for transport to a temporary clean room free from contaminants in the Earth’s atmosphere, where it will be preserved with nitrogen and then transported to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Seven years after its initial launch, OSIRIS-REx deposited the capsule of uncontaminated material from Bennu to the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles from Salt Lake City, before heading off on another mission, this time to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis. The space rock is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old - meaning it formed around the same time as the solar system and likely holds pre-solar material, as well as amino acids, the building blocks of life. The NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, delivered a sample of material from the asteroid Bennu. A capsule bearing soil from an asteroid located 200 million miles from Earth landed in Utah at 8:52 am Mountain time Sunday, bringing with it - scientists hope - information about the origin of life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |