NASA now knows how much material it managed to bring back from the asteroid Bennu – 02/18/2024 – Messenger Sideral

NASA finally knows the exact number of samples it brought to Earth from the asteroid Bennu with the Osiris-Rex mission. There were a total of 121.6 grams, the agency reported last Thursday (15). It is the largest sample of an asteroid ever collected in space and twice the minimum requirement for the mission.

Despite this, there are those who see the glass as half empty. After all, at the time of collection, in October 2020, based only on the images transmitted by the probe, scientists imagined they would have hundreds of grams to analyze. It’s another one of those demonstrations of how difficult it is to predict how things will unfold in an inhospitable environment that is impossible to simulate perfectly on Earth, such as the surface of an asteroid.

The samples returned to our planet in a capsule on September 24th and have since been handled by curators from the Exploration Science and Astromaterials Research division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. They were in the instrument specifically designed to collect them from the asteroid, and it was not simple to remove them all.

In October last year, opening work was halted because 2 of the device’s 35 fasteners refused to open. The team had to design, produce and test new tools to remove them, which only happened in January, making complete disassembly possible.

As a result, another 51.2 grams of material that was inside the instrument joined another 70.3 grams in the upper portion of the collector and a few more particles collected outside it, but inside the capsule, totaling 121.6 grams.

The result, despite frustrating the most optimistic estimates at the time of collection, in which material was seen literally overflowing from the collector and leaking into space (which forced them to quickly close the capsule to avoid losing any more content), is little more than double what was initially stipulated (60 grams) as necessary to successfully complete the mission’s scientific objectives.

A preliminary analysis of the composition of the rocks, carried out in October last year, revealed the presence of compounds rich in carbon and water, but more detailed examinations are beginning now, with the samples released for studies. NASA reports that at least 70% of the total will be preserved untouched at Johnson for future research. The asteroid’s regolith (fine dust) will be distributed to more than 200 scientists around the world for study, and the larger rocks will be cataloged by curators before being made available to the global scientific community for investigation.

There will also be an exchange of material with Jaxa, the Japanese space agency, which collected samples from two other asteroids (in significantly smaller quantities) with the Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 missions.

The expectation is that the study of the composition of asteroids will help to elucidate where the precursor molecules of life on Earth came from, as these space rocks represent remnants of the material that formed the planets of the Solar System, 4.6 billion years ago.

This column is published on Mondays in print, in Folha Corrida.

Follow Sidereal Messenger on Facebook, TwitterInstagram and YouTube

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.