NASA finds water and organics in an asteroid sample – possible clues to the origin of life

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Texas — When they unveiled the first samples recovered from an asteroid on Wednesday, scientists were amazed at the possibilities of what the material will tell us about the origins of our planet, and perhaps even ourselves.

After seven years in space, a small spacecraft carrying samples from the asteroid Bennu landed in the Utah desert in late September. After following carefully designed procedures to prevent contamination by asteroid dust and rocks from life on Earth, the samples were transferred to a clean room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston two weeks ago. Since then, scientists have examined some of the material collected outside the initial container to get some initial insights. They revealed some of their first data during an event held at the center on Wednesday.

“Boy, did we really pull this off?” said Dante Lauretta, a University of Arizona scientist and principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission.

Scientists have not yet opened the main container, a process that will unfold in the coming weeks as all this material begins to be cataloged. Before launching this mission, scientists said that recovering 60 grams of material would be considered a success. While efforts to determine the total mass continue, Lauretta said preliminary estimates indicate the asteroid capture mission collected about 250 grams of gravel and dust from Bennu’s surface.

After the material is catalogued, it will be loaned in small quantities to 230 scholars from 35 member countries of the association. assets, spectral interpretation, resource identification and security, regolith explorer, or the OSIRIS-Rex mission team.

Digging into our origins

So why is it important to recover original samples from the asteroid’s surface? What’s important is that Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid about half a kilometer in diameter, is believed to be a time capsule of the types of rocks and chemicals that were present when the planets in our solar system formed more than 4 billion years ago. By studying Bennu, scientists are looking back at that primordial era when Earth began to transform from a sweltering world with a hellish surface environment into something more like a ball of mud.

Trapping these pebbles and rocks with sophisticated equipment here on Earth may allow Laurita and other scientists to answer questions about how terrestrial planets like Earth and Mars formed, and perhaps whether asteroids seeded Earth with the essential elements for life.

In a preliminary analysis of some of the dust, Lauretta said scientists hit the jackpot with a sample that contains approximately 5 percent carbon by mass and contains abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals. It is very plausible that such asteroids delivered the vast majority of the water now found in Earth’s oceans, lakes and rivers billions of years ago.

By piecing together evidence from asteroid dust — both water and organic molecules — scientists believe they may better understand how Earth went from an uninhabited ball of mud to the world teeming with life today.

“This is incredible material,” said Daniel Glavin, a researcher involved in the mission. “It’s full of organic matter. If we’re looking for biologically essential organic molecules, we’ve chosen the right asteroid, and brought back the right sample. This is an astrobiologist’s dream.”

Wait, there’s more

In addition to exploring the origins of Earth and perhaps life on it, materials obtained from this mission will provide insight into other questions.

For example, NASA and some companies are interested in harvesting resources from asteroids to support human exploration deeper into the solar system. Bennu’s comprehensive investigation will provide information about the resources found in this type of carbon-rich asteroid and how difficult it is to harvest and process them for fuel.

NASA, of course, is also interested in planetary defense. Bennu is one of a small subset of asteroids that orbit outside the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and is of great interest because it will likely intersect with Earth. According to scientists, there is a 1 in 2,700 chance that Bennu will hit Earth between now and September 2182.

Although Bennu is about one-twentieth the size of the large asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs nearly 70 million years ago, it is large enough to destroy multiple cities or cause a massive tsunami. Understanding the nature of Bennu will help scientists and engineers understand how best to influence and change the orbit of threatened asteroids in the future.

A classy story

The world is awash in bad news at the moment, with the terrible conflicts in Ukraine and Israel capturing a great deal of international discussion. But the asteroid recovery story is a positive one. NASA worked closely with space agencies in Japan and Canada on the mission and partnered with scientists in dozens of countries to study the returned materials. Such an effort unites humanity, not divides it.

“Why do we do that?” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson asked rhetorically on Wednesday. “Because at NASA, we’re trying to figure out who we are, who we are, where we come from, and what our place is in this vast space we call the universe.”

This is not the first mission to return samples from an asteroid. The Japanese Space Agency was a pioneer in this field. The small Hayabusa 1 spacecraft returned 1,500 small asteroid grains to Earth in 2010, and a decade later, the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft returned more, about 5 grams, to Earth.

But the material recovered from OSIRIS-REx is many times more abundant, and with larger rocks embedded within the sample, it is likely to provide more significant scientific data. The beauty of OSIRIS-REx is that we still don’t know what we will find, but we are at the moment of tantalizing searching when we can be sure that we will be dazzled by these discoveries in the future. Months and years.

What I find most inspiring about big scientific missions like this is that they show what humanity can be at its best. It takes broad international collaboration, coming together from many different backgrounds and disciplines, to do something that individuals cannot do alone – to reach beyond the cradle of our civilization to discover something new about our world, our world, and ourselves. .

If we work together, we can do great things. If we work together, the future of our species is limitless.