2023-10-08 07:00:00
Written by Amira Shehata Sunday, October 8, 2023 10:00 AM NASA will give the public a look at the asteroid sample returned to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft next week, and a live broadcast of the reveal is scheduled to occur at 6 pm Egypt time on Wednesday, October 11. According to what was reported by the “engadget” website, the capsule containing rocks and dust taken from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid “Bennu” landed at a training site affiliated with the Ministry of Defense in the Utah desert a few days ago, and since then scientists have been working on conducting their preliminary analyses. OSIRIS-REx obtained its sample from Bennu in 2020 and spent the next year and a half observing the asteroid from above, before it began heading back toward Earth in May 2021. After landing last month, the canister was moved and brought to Houston, Texas, to be opened. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center, on the other hand, OSIRIS-REx is still in space, now heading to an asteroid called Apophis under the new mission name, OSIRIS-APEX. Asteroid Bennu is estimated to be more than 4.5 billion years old, which means the materials found in it might hold clues regarding the formation of the solar system and how the basic elements of life arrived on Earth. The mission was able to capture more material than anyone expected, as Christopher Snyder, deputy chief of OSIRIS-REx processing at NASA, said: “The problem facing us is that there is a lot of material, and collecting it is taking longer than we expected, and with the broadcast date approaching.” “We will soon know more regarding what they have discovered in this material so far.”
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