NASA on Wednesday showed off its first asteroid samples delivered last month by a spacecraft — a jumble of black dust and rubble that is the most ever returned to Earth.
Scientists anticipated getting a cupful, but are still unsure how much material was grabbed from the carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu, almost 97 million kilometers away.
That is because the main sample chamber has yet to be opened, officials said during an event at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Photo: AFP / NASA
“It’s been going slow and meticulous, but the science is already starting,” said the mission’s lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona.
NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft collected the samples three years ago from the surface of Bennu and dropped them off sealed in a capsule during a flyby of Earth last month.
The expected cupful was far more than the teaspoon or so that Japan brought back from a pair of missions.
Black dust and particles were scattered around the outside edge of the internal sample chamber, Lauretta said.
There is still “a whole treasure chest of extraterrestrial material” to be studied, he said.
No one at Johnson Space Center got to see any of the samples firsthand — just photographs and videos.
The asteroid pieces were behind locked doors in a new lab at the space center, accessible only to scientists in protective gear.
Besides carbon, the asteroid rubble holds water in clay minerals, Lauretta and others said.
“That is how we think water got to the Earth,” he said. “Minerals like we’re seeing from Bennu landed on Earth 4 billion years ago to 4.5 billion years ago, making our world habitable.”
That was one of the primary reasons for the US$1 billion, seven-year mission: to study theories about how the solar system formed.
“You can’t get more exciting than that,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said.
In 2020, Lauretta and his team lost some of their haul when the lid on the sample container jammed a few days after the spacecraft collected the material.
It vacuumed up so many pieces from Bennu that small rocks got lodged under the lid and prevented it from closing, sending pieces floating off into space.
That is why scientists did not have a precise measurement of what was coming back; they estimated 250g ahead of the Sept. 24 landing in the Utah desert.
They will not have a good count until the container is opened, within two weeks or so.
Much of the material shown on Wednesday was overflow from when the lid was stuck open, before everything could be sealed inside the return capsule. The larger visible rocks were under 2.5cm in size.
“We have a bounty of sample on our hands already and we’re not even inside” the main sample container, NASA astromaterials curator Francis McCubbin said.
Once the samples are archived, the team would dole out particles to researchers around the world, while saving a fair amount for analysis when better technology is available.
NASA has another asteroid-chasing spacecraft on a Florida launch pad, ready to blast off later this week.
The destination is an asteroid named Psyche.
That mission has no sample return program.
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