Inside Building 31 at Johnson Space Center, NASA scientists have opened a metal container containing rocks the agency recovered from a distant asteroid.
NASA has spent months trying to remove two “recalcitrant” fasteners on the container lid, which is no easy task. The asteroid’s cache, after parachuting to Earth from space, has been (reasonably) isolated inside a specially designed glove box, with limited tools and access.
Now, the lid is off, and the agency has captured images of most of its captures of the asteroid Bennu, a 1,600-foot-diameter asteroid composed of rocks and debris. This is a reward from the agency’s first mission to bring intact pieces of an asteroid back to our planet, an effort called OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Regolith Explorer).
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“Already opened! Already opened! And ready for close photos,” NASA wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
You can see dark stones up to about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) wide, and smaller particles of various sizes.
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A piece of the asteroid Bennu in NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample container.
Credit: NASA / Erika Blumenfeld / Joseph Aebersold
These samples are very valuable. Asteroid Bennu, like many other asteroids, is a well-preserved time capsule of our ancient solar system. They’re about 4.5 billion years old, so these intact rocks could give scientists insight into how objects like planets form, and how Earth might get its water.
To retrieve these samples, the OSIRIS-REx probe approached the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 and extended an arm containing a sample container (called TAGSAM, or Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism). Then, the probe pushed the asteroid Bennu for just five seconds, blowing nitrogen gas onto the asteroid, which pushed rocks and dust into the container.
More than three years later, pieces of Bennu are safely stored at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Over the next two years, NASA science teams will intensively study these samples. However, the agency will not keep it to itself. NASA says that more than 200 scientists around the world will study Bennu’s rocks and dust. Furthermore, some of the asteroid samples will be preserved for future scientists — with technology we don’t yet have or can’t even imagine — to analyze.
What secrets will Bennu reveal?
2024-01-20 17:33:15
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