An asteroid sample collected by NASA has returned to Earth, and now scientists are saying that it could hold details about the early days of our solar system.
The sample comes from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu and was collected through the OSIRIS-REx project, NASA shared. The project saw a spacecraft collect a piece of the asteroid in October 2020 and return its findings to Earth last month.
After analyzing what was inside the capsule that landed in the Utah desert, NASA administrator Bill Nelson shared in a press release that the rocks and dust contained water and large amounts of carbon.
“The first analysis shows samples that contain abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals, and they contain carbon as both minerals and organic molecules,” Nelson said.
According to Dr. Jason Dworkin, who worked on OSIRIS-REx, the sample is nearly 5% carbon by weight, making it one of the highest concentrations of the substance to be studied in an asteroid.
Nelson says the findings suggest that asteroids may have brought the building blocks of life to Earth.
“Far exceeding our goal of 60 grams, this is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever returned to Earth,” Nelson said. “The carbon and water molecules are exactly the kinds of material that we wanted to find. They’re crucial elements in the formation of our own planet. And they’re going to help us determine the origin of elements that could have led to life.”
Bennu is nearly 4.5 billion years old, and scientists are continuing to study the materials inside their sample of the asteroid. The sample is also the largest from an asteroid ever returned to Earth, NASA shared.
NASA’s goal for the OSIRIS-REx mission was to collect 60 grams of asteroid material so that curation experts could analyze the materials.
After recovering the capsule containing the goodies, experts entered a special room to examine the contents for 10 days. Inside, they found bonus asteroid material covering the outside of the collector head, canister lid, and base.
There was so much extra material inside that it slowed down the careful process of collecting and continuing the primary sample, NASA shared.
“Our labs were ready for whatever Bennu had in store for us,” Vanessa Wyche, the director of NASA Johnson, said. “We’ve had scientists and engineers working side-by-side for years to develop specialized gloveboxes and tools to keep the asteroid material pristine and to curate the samples so researchers now and decades from now can study this precious gift from the cosmos.”
While the mission is being dubbed a success, NASA isn’t planning on stopping with the sample from Bennu.
“We’re just beginning here, but we picked the right asteroid, and not only that, we brought back the right sample,” Dr. Daniel Glavin, OSIRIS-REx sample analyst and senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said. “This stuff is an astrobiologist’s dream.”