NASA just took an extraordinary step in our relentless quest to understand the universe. With a precious sample from the asteroid Bennu now on Earth, we are closer than ever to unlocking new secrets of our solar system.
The sample collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission represents much more than just a piece of rock. Bennu, from which OSIRIS-REx collected its sample, is composed of material believed to be about 4,5 billion years old. This makes it a time capsule. A fragment of history that could hold answers to fundamental questions about our solar system and, perhaps, our very existence.
The mission and its inestimable value
Launched in 2016, the OSIRIS-REx mission had the ambitious goal of reaching the asteroid Bennu, collecting a 250-gram sample and bringing it back to Earth. And now, after a journey of nearly 2 billion kilometers (1,2 billion miles), she has returned home. But why all this effort for a little dust and rock?
Melissa Morris, OSIRIS-REx program manager, underlined the importance of missions like this, stating: “Missions like this allow us to investigate the rich population of asteroids in our solar system which can provide us with clues about how the solar system formed and evolved." It's like trying to read the story of our origins.
Precision landing
The scientific capsule, containing the precious sample, landed at the Utah Test and Training Range of the US Department of Defense, an area chosen for its vastness and its history of NASA sample return missions such as Genesis and Stardust.
The entire mission required extreme precision, especially when the spacecraft had to reach the asteroid and collect its sample (which happened in 2020).
Thanks to this precision we could finally understand if our life was formed on ancient asteroid bodies like Bennu and was then "delivered" to Earth.
Not a new theory, but OSIRIS-REx could finally validate it.
Not just Bennu: we await other cosmic evidence
Although the OSIRIS-REx mission is the first time that sample from an asteroid has been brought here by NASA, it is not the first such mission globally. The Japanese space agency JAXA has already collected samples from asteroids in his Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2 missions.
Both asteroids reached by the missions, Ryugu and Bennu, have a spinning top-like shape, but are very different in size and color. By analyzing and comparing their samples on Earth, scientists hope to better understand these differences as well.
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