Tasked with finding clues about origins of life on Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft scooped up pieces of a rugged, rubble-pile asteroid named Bennu in late 2020 and delivered them to Earth about two months ago. On Monday (Dec. 11), scientists got their first detailed description of some of that extraterrestrial collection.
“We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the early solar system, which is exactly what we were hoping when we first conceived this mission almost 20 years ago,” Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, said at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference being held this week in California and online. “I fully expect the cosmochemistry community is going to go to town on this.”
Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona, said the bits of the 3-billion-year-old asteroid that have been retrieved so far are from the outer lid of the sample capsule and are rich in carbon and organic molecules. All the particles are very dark in color and consist of centimeter- and millimeter-sized “hummocky boulders” that have a rough “cauliflower-like texture”, said Lauretta. “They cling to everything we touch them with.”
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