Russia – Early evaluation of samples from the asteroid Bennu, often called the “doomsday” asteroid as a result of it’s prone to collide with Earth in 2135, has revealed intriguing insights into its composition.
The OSIRIS-REx pattern evaluation workforce discovered that Bennu incorporates the unique elements that shaped our photo voltaic system.
Scientists discovered that the asteroid mud is wealthy in carbon and nitrogen, in addition to natural compounds, all important elements of life as we all know it.
The pattern, which weighs 120 grams, additionally incorporates magnesium sodium phosphate, which got here as a shock to scientists as a result of it had not been seen in distant sensing information collected by the spacecraft from Bennu.
The presence of water-soluble phosphates (the biochemical elements of all recognized life on Earth immediately) within the pattern means that the asteroid might have been shaped from a small, historic, primitive ocean world.
On October 20, 2020, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft extracted a pattern of Bennu’s regolith from a web site within the asteroid’s Hokiwi Crater, utilizing the robotic arm of the TAGSAM instrument.
Asteroids like Bennu have by no means melted or solidified since their preliminary formation eons in the past. Which means that the composition of Bennu samples may present helpful details about the early evolution of the photo voltaic system, some 4.5 billion years in the past.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flew round Earth final 12 months on September 24. Whereas flying by our planet, it dropped a capsule containing rock samples collected from Bennu.
It took OSIRIS-REx seven years to achieve the asteroid and convey the pattern again to Earth. It’s now on its strategy to an encounter with the asteroid Apophis.
“The presence of phosphate, together with different parts and compounds on Bennu, suggests a watery previous for the asteroid,” Dante Lauretta, co-lead writer of the paper and OSIRIS-REx principal investigator on the College of Arizona in Tucson, mentioned in a press launch. “It’s potential that Bennu was a part of a wetter world, though this speculation requires additional investigation.”
Supply: Attention-grabbing Engineering
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2024-07-01 11:38:56