NASA’s first asteroid sample is the most pristine sample of its kind.
Now, back on Earth, the sample from the asteroid Bennu has already yielded surprising discoveries about the early solar system and the asteroid’s possible origins.
After a seven-year journey to the asteroid Bennu and back, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft last year returned a sample of rocks and soil collected from the primitive asteroid to the Utah desert.
It took some time to carefully remove the lid of the sample container, but even the first bits of asteroid that emerged from the lid turned out to be rich in carbon, an essential element for all life on Earth.
Scientists from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Team published their initial findings on the Bennu sample.
They say they have found organic compounds.
The sample also contained the surprising find of magnesium-sodium phosphate, which the space team could not see in the asteroid’s spectra.
OSIRIS-REx spent several years mapping the asteroid before taking the first step to collect the sample.
Humberto Campins, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Central Florida, was part of the OSIRIS-REX science team during the OSIRIS-REx mission and said the team expected to find hydrated minerals, or minerals that reacted with water.
“But the magnesium sodium phosphates are the result of a hydration process … which suggests a very complex fluid, reactions or chemical reactions inside Bennu’s parent,” said Campins, who was not involved in the new study. “We still don’t understand it. The detailed study of this will tell us a lot more about what was happening inside the parent.”
The findings showed that Bennu’s parent planet may have contained water.
“The presence and status of phosphates, along with other elements and compounds on Bennu, suggest a watery past for the asteroid,” said Dante Lauretta, co-lead author of the paper and principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Bennu could once have been part of a wetter world. However, this hypothesis requires further investigation.”
Just the Beginning of Bennu’s Surprises
The latest findings are more evidence that the OSRIS-REx team has picked the right asteroid to bring a piece back to Earth. According to NASA, the sample analysis team is finding something new every week.
Bennu’s discoveries will soon become a global science initiative.
Dozens of labs in the U.S. and around the world will receive portions of the Bennu samples from NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Campins expects that now that the sample is on Earth, it will yield much more research and discoveries.
“This is going to be a very interesting couple of years,” Campins said. “It’s starting to give us a different lens, a different dataset, to try to understand the most primitive material in the solar system, which is probably linked to the origin of water on Earth, probably linked to the origin of organic molecules on Earth, which was a big motivator for this mission.”
If scientists have access to a pristine specimen of an asteroid that formed 4.5 billion years ago and has not been affected by Earth’s atmosphere or other pollution, they could answer key questions about how life on Earth emerged.
Campins said it’s possible that Bennu could help answer the crucial question of what was the “step between the most complex organic molecule and the first living cell.”
The spacecraft is operating under a new name and a new mission.
The new OSIRIS-APEX mission will study the asteroid Apophis when it flies by Earth in 2029. This encounter will be so close that we will be able to see the asteroid from Earth without the aid of a telescope.