NASA finally shared its long-awaited study of rocks from a very old object that could hit Earth in 150 years.
A robot was sent by the space agency to the 1,250-foot asteroid Bennu in 2020 as part of a historic mission to collect samples. These samples are now being studied in a top lab in Texas.
It was found that the space rock, which could hit Earth in 2182, has a lot of carbon and water on it. This suggests that asteroids like Bennu may have brought the building blocks for life to Earth.
NASA said the finds could help us figure out how life began on Earth and could also be used as a time capsule to see how our solar system looked in its early days.
The samples will also help us learn more about how to protect Earth from asteroids like Bennu in the future, since the trip let NASA measure how fast it spins.
What we really want to know is if an asteroid is going to cross over Earth’s orbit at the same time that we are there. We don’t want to be there when an asteroid comes by,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science section.
“This is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever brought back to Earth,” Nelson said during the video that started at 11 a.m. ET. “At nearly 5% carbon by weight—carbon being the building block of life—far exceeding our goal of 60g,”
“They will help us figure out where the elements that could have made life possible came from.”
Daniel Glavin, who is in charge of OSIRIS-REx’s sample analysis, agreed with Nelson that carbon had been found and said that he had spent a lot of time looking into whether asteroids like Bennu brought prebiotic chemicals to Earth that started life.
Glavin said, “Not only did we pick the right asteroid, but we also brought back the right sample.”
“I can’t wait to get to this stuff; it’s an astrobiologist’s dream.”
In 2020, the OSIRIS-REx mission took rocks and dust from the asteroid and brought them back to Earth in a capsule. The capsule landed in the Utah desert a little more than two weeks ago.
The journey brought back about eight ounces of space junk that NASA thinks contains building blocks from the beginning of our solar system and could help us figure out how life began on Earth.
NASA chose to take samples from Bennu because it is thought to have a lot of organic materials.
Scientists believe that similar asteroids may have brought water and biological building blocks to Earth billions of years ago when they collided.
Making the trip back and forth easier than going to the Asteroid Belt, which is between Mars and Jupiter, was Bennu’s path crossing ours.
So far, the finding of “bonus particles,” which are black dust and other debris covering the sample collector, has given NASA researchers hope.
The mothership, Osiris-Rex, took off on the $1 billion journey in 2016.
After two years, it got to Bennu and used a long stick cleaner to pick up debris from the small, round space rock in 2020.
The spaceship had gone four billion miles before it came back.
The spaceship let go of the capsule at 6:42 a.m. ET, and it hit the atmosphere at 27,650 miles per hour (mph).
Bennu is about a third of a mile across, which is about the same size as the Empire State Building. It is currently 50 million miles from Earth and in orbit around the sun.
The asteroid is also shaped like a spinning top, and scientists think it is a piece that broke off of a much bigger space rock.
People think that Bennu is the most dangerous rock in the Solar System because it has the best chance of hitting Earth of any known space object because its orbit crosses with it.
NASA has been studying the asteroid for a long time. In 2021, they said it “has a 1 in 1,750 chance of hitting Earth” in “the afternoon of September 24, 2182.
Bennu is only about a third of a mile wide”, so even if it did hit Earth, it would not even come close to “the size of the six-mile-wide space rock that killed the dinosaurs on the Yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago.
Even so, if Bennu” hit Earth, it would be like “more than 1.1 billion tons of TNT” going off at the same time.
According to Kelly Fast, who is in charge of “the Near-Earth Object Observations” “Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC”, “NASA’s Planetary Defense mission is to find and watch asteroids and comets that can come close to Earth and may be dangerous to our planet.” This was said in 2021.
“We do this by conducting ongoing astronomical surveys that gather information to help us find objects we didn’t know about before and improve our models of their orbits.”
“The OSIRIS-REx mission has given us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to improve and test these models, which has helped us figure out where Bennu will be when it comes close to Earth more than one hundred years from now.”