Largest Asteroid Sample Ever Collected Is Coming Down to Earth
Chunks of asteroid that could tell us about the earliest days of the 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and the possible origins of water on our planet are set to land in the Utah desert Sunday.
It's a moment more than a decade in the making for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx. Its goal was to scoop up a large sample of rocks and dust from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and bring it to our planet to study. The spacecraft successfully snagged its prize in 2020 and this weekend will finally pass by Earth and release a capsule containing the sample and send it careening down to Utah.
“This is, of course, the moment we've all been waiting for,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Science Mission Directorate's Planetary Science Division.
The sample will help scientists get a snapshot of what materials were present when our Solar System first formed. Researchers believe asteroids like Bennu haven't changed much since the birth of our cosmic neighborhood. They plan to study the recovered rocks and use the mission to inform future exploration.
“Asteroids, we believe, could have been the source material not just for building up the rocky parts of our planet, but also for delivering the water that makes up our hydrologic system,” Glaze said.
Scientists don't know exactly how much sample is in the container, but suspect it's the most ever collected from an asteroid, weighing roughly 250 grams — or about as much as a hamster. That will give them more rocks to analyze than ever before.
OSIRIS-REx grabbed more rocks and materials than expected — so much, that it jammed the spacecraft's sample collector open and some of it went spewing out into space. NASA opted not to measure the sample and instead quickly stowed the rocks to keep them
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