Inside Building 31 at the Johnson Space Center, NASA scientists opened a metal container containing rocks recovered by the agency from a distant asteroid.
NASA spent months trying to remove two “recalcitrant” fasteners on the container lid, which is no easy task. The asteroid hideout, after parachuting to Earth from space, was (reasonably) isolated inside a specially designed storage compartment, with limited tools and access.
Now, the lid is off and the agency has captured images of the majority of its captures of asteroid Bennu, a 1,600-foot-diameter asteroid composed of rocks and debris. It’s a reward for the agency’s first mission to bring intact pieces of an asteroid back to our planet, an initiative called OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Regolith Explorer).
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“Already open! Already open! And ready for close-up photos,” NASA wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
You can see dark stones up to about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) wide and smaller particles of various sizes.
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A piece of the asteroid Bennu in NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample container.
Credit: NASA / Erika Blumenfeld / Joseph Aebersold
These samples are very valuable. Asteroid Bennu, like many other asteroids, is a well-preserved time capsule of our ancient solar system. They are about 4.5 billion years old, so these intact rocks could give scientists information about how objects like planets form and how Earth might get its water.
To retrieve these samples, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft approached asteroid Bennu in October 2020 and extended an arm containing a sample container (called TAGSAM, or Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism). Then, the probe nudged the asteroid Bennu for just five seconds, blowing nitrogen gas onto the asteroid, which pushed rocks and dust into the container.
More than three years later, pieces of Bennu are safely stored at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Over the next two years, NASA science teams will intensively study these samples. However, the agency will not keep it to itself. NASA says more than 200 scientists around the world will study Bennu’s rocks and dust. Additionally, some asteroid samples will be preserved for analysis by future scientists, with technology we don’t yet have or can’t even imagine.
What secrets will Bennu reveal?
2024-01-20 17:33:15
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