NASA presents new carbon-rich asteroid sample

On Wednesday, the POT released a first look at what scientists found inside a sealed capsule that was returned to the Land last month carrying a carbon-rich soil sample extracted from the surface of a asteroidincluding clay minerals that contain water.

A small amount of material collected by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft three years ago from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu was presented in an auditorium at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, just over two weeks after it was launched. parachute into the Utah desert.

The landing of the return capsule capped a seven-year joint mission by the US space agency and the University of Arizona. It was only the third, and by far the largest, asteroid sample to return to Earth for analysis, following two similar missions by the Japanese space agency that ended in 2010 and 2020.

“It’s days like this that continue to surprise me,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said from the stage as he presented on a screen the first image of material recovered from Bennu, a celestial artifact about 4.5 billion years old.

The image showed a loose cluster of small rocks, pebbles and charcoal-colored dust left on the outside of the sample collection array when the asteroid’s soil was sucked through a filter into the spacecraft’s storage canister.

Technicians are still methodically disassembling the hardware surrounding the internal scientific container that holds most of the specimen, a process that is expected to take two more weeks.

What they found so far was material with a high carbon content, almost the 5% by weight of an element essential for all life on Earth, as well as water molecules encased in the crystallized structure of clay fibers, said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of the mission at the University of Arizona.

Scientists also discovered iron minerals in the form of sulfides and iron oxides, “which in themselves are indicative of formation in a water-rich environment”Lauretta added in a subsequent press conference.

Daniel Glavin, senior sample scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said early analyzes found that the material appears to be “loaded with organic matter.”

Preliminary findings point to the likelihood of new discoveries that could bolster the hypothesis that early Earth was seeded with the prime ingredients for life thanks to celestial objects such as comets, asteroids and meteorites that bombarded the young planet.

Source: Reuters