SPACE — After a journey of seven years and nearly 4 billion miles, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft capsule landed smoothly in the Utah desert September 24, 2023. It was carrying a valuable payload, samples from the asteroid Bennu.
About half a pound of material collected from the 85 million ton asteroid is claimed to help scientists learn about the formation of the solar system. Including whether asteroids like Bennu contain chemicals for life.
However, this mission has been widely questioned because of its high cost. The NASA mission was budgeted at 800 million US dollars and cost around 1.16 billion US dollars or Rp. 25,504,000,000,000 for a sample of less than 9 ounces (255 grams).
With these facts, one ounce of asteroids costs 132 million US dollars or IDR 2,104,080,000,000 (IDR 74,918,000,000 per gram). That value is around 70,000 times the price of gold in recent years.
Also read: NASA: Asteroid Bennu samples contain the origins of life like on Earth
By comparison, the first space material to return to Earth came from the Apollo program. Between 1969 and 1972, six Apollo missions brought back lunar samples weighing 842 pounds (382 kg).
The total cost of the Apollo program, adjusted for inflation, was 257 billion US dollars. However, if detailed, the value of the Moon rocks is relatively cheap at 19 million US dollars or Rp
302,860,000,000 per ounce. In addition, the Apollo program had additional value, namely demonstrating space flight technology, even for the first humans on the moon.
NASA also plans to bring samples from Mars in the early 2030s to determine whether the planet contains traces of ancient life or not. The mission will take 30 sample tubes with a total weight of one pound (450 g). The Perseverance rover has stored 10 such samples in its warehouse.
The costs for Mars samples are higher because they are complicated and involve lots of robots and spacecraft. Bringing back the sample could cost 11 billion US dollars, bringing the cost to 690 million US dollars or IDR 302,860,000,000 per ounce, five times the cost of the Bennu sample unit.
Also read: This is how OSIRIS-REx took samples from the Asteroid Bennu
It is not very wise to blame the Bennu and Mars sample missions because of their fantastic value. But in fact, some space rocks don’t cost anything.
Nearly 50 tons of free samples from the solar system rain down on Earth every day and most of them come from asteroids. Most of it burns up in the atmosphere, but much of the rest reaches the ground in the form of meteorites.
Meteorites can be expensive because they are difficult to spot and retrieve once they reach Earth. Because, all rocks look the same, unless you are a geologist.
However, the limitation of free samples is that there is no way to know where they came from, on the Moon or Mars, limiting their scientific usefulness. In addition, they would have been contaminated soon after landing on Earth, making it difficult to know whether any of the microbes inside them had extraterrestrial origins. Source: Live Science
2023-10-27 23:12:00
#NASA #Spends #IDR #Ounces #Asteroid #Bennu #Samples #Free
