After being stymied by two stuck screws, NASA finally accessed a trove of Bennu asteroid bits. Mission scientist Harold Connolly tells what’s next.
It’s official: NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft snagged 121.6 grams of pristine space rocks when it bopped the asteroid Bennu four years ago, more than double the mission’s official science goal,Launched in 2016, OSIRIS-Rex is NASA’s first mission to collect samples from an asteroid and return them to Earth so scientists can study our solar system’s origins. After performing its grab-and-go procedure from the diamond-shaped Bennu, the spacecraft).
The diamond-shaped asteroid Bennu, seen here during OSIRIS-Rex’s approach, is a loose rubble pile held together by gravity., weighing the full sample has been delayed by a couple stuck screws that prevented anyone from accessing the entire contents of the capsule to finally open the canister of dust and rock brought back from the asteroid Bennu.Can you tell me anything about what you’ve found from the sample you have so far?It’s a serpentinite.
When that object formed, material came together, brought ices with it — and not just water ice, but carbon monoxide and ammonia ice — which means it had to accrete somewhere out past what we call the snow line, out past Mars in the outer solar system. At that distance from the sun, temperatures are low enough for those ices to form.
Eventually, the interior of the larger, original object started to heat up because of radioactivity that’s naturally in the material, and that began to melt the ice and become fluid. Fluid began to interact with the parent body to form new minerals — like serpentinite — from the material that accreted.
We’ll be teasing out how much of it was altered, how much is relic from the pre-accretion stage, how much is actually from stars that died and injected dust into our solar system.
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