2023-10-13 11:00:05
NASA has offered a first glimpse of the sampling carried out by OSIRIS-REx, illustrating the US space agency’s first successful mission to collect a rocky asteroid fragment.
View of the sample inside the OSIRIS-REx sample collector.
Credit: NASA
The sample, a space rock mass weighing between 100 and 250 grams, comes from the surface of the asteroid Bennu. It contains water and carbon, as revealed during a press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston ( Houston is a city in Texas in the southern United States. With a population of more than…), Wednesday October 11. It was only two weeks following returning to Earth at a speed of nearly 43,000 km/h, on September 24, that NASA unveiled this sample. After a journey (Before designating a journey (pleasant or not, short or long, by sea or not, effective or…) of seven years and 6.4 million kilometers (The meter (symbol m, from the Greek metron, measurement) is the basic unit of length of the System…), the capsule, equipped with its parachute, landed safely in the desert of Utah before being sent to the Johnson Space Center for analysis.
The asteroid Bennu, known to be potentially dangerous, has a one in 2,700 chance of hitting the Earth in 2182. However, scientists’ interest is focused more on the possible extraterrestrial precursors of life on Earth locked in this asteroid.
“This is the largest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever returned to Earth,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the conference. “Carbon and water are the elements we were hoping to find. They are essential to the formation of our planet and will help us to understand the origin of the elements conducive to life.”
Two images captured by OSIRIS-REx during contact of the sampling arm with the surface of Bennu.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
The quest for the origins of water and life on Earth might be illuminated by the analysis of such samples. The building blocks of life might have been brought to Earth by asteroids similar to Bennu, a carbon-rich B-type asteroid.
Compounds such as uracil, the basis of RNA, discovered on the asteroid Ryugu by the space agency’s Hayabusa2 mission (A space agency is a state body whose aim is to study Space and develop …) Japanese in 2020, are promising clues. OSIRIS-REx scientists hope to discover other potential precursors of terrestrial biology in the Bennu sample.
Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx, sees in the sample from Bennu a “time capsule” allowing us to explore the origins of our Solar System. “With each revelation of Bennu, we come closer to deciphering the mysteries of our cosmic heritage,” he emphasized.
The sampling was an arduous task, requiring nearly two years of searching for a landing site on the rugged surface of Bennu. The successful operation, OSIRIS-REx left Bennu for Earth in May 2021, marking a major step forward in the quest to understand our universe (The Universe is the set of everything that exists and the laws that govern it). govern.).
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