NASA brings to Earth the largest sample of an asteroid that would help decipher the origin of life and the solar system

Global Courant

For the first time in its history, NASA managed to bring a sample of an asteroid to Earth on September 24, which scientists hope will provide unique information about the origin of life and the formation of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. .

Amid great expectation, the NASA capsule containing samples of the asteroid Bennu landed in the Utah desert, United States, ending a seven-year journey.

This is the first time that NASA, the US space agency, has managed to bring samples from an asteroid to Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) managed to recover asteroid remains in 2020, but it was a minimal amount, no more than a teaspoon of dust and rocks.

The NASA mission, named Osiris-Rex, hopes to have collected 250 grams of remains from the asteroid Bennu, although scientists will not know for sure until they open the capsule in two days.

According to Argentine NASA planetary scientist Lucas Paganini, Bennu contains molecules that date back to the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago and could shed light on questions that have intrigued humanity for centuries, such as the origin of life and the solar system itself.

“They are time capsules”

“Asteroids are very important because they are the debris from when the planets formed 4.5 billion years ago. They are like time capsules, equivalent to dinosaur fossils that allow us to know what was happening millions of years ago. In this case, with our mission, we are traveling billions of years back in time,” Paganini explained.

Scientists believe that these molecules could have reached our planet aboard meteorites and, therefore, analyzing the composition of Bennu will help them verify this hypothesis and clarify what role celestial bodies could have played in the origin of life.

Precisely, scientists chose Bennu because it is relatively rich in organic molecules and, in addition, has a known orbit, which made it easier for the Osiris-Rex mothership to approach to take samples.

Discovered in 1999, Bennu is believed to have formed from fragments of a much larger asteroid following a collision. It is half a kilometer wide, about the height of the Empire State Building, and its rough, black surface is littered with large rocks.

In addition, there is a hypothesis that Bennu will collide with Earth in 159 years and, although this possibility is only 0.057%, this NASA mission would also serve to see how to change the trajectory of the asteroid if necessary, Paganini told EFE. .

“Welcome Home!”

NASA live-streamed the landing of the capsule, the size of a baby carrier, in the Utah desert.

The most exciting moment came when the roughly 32-by-20-inch parachute deployed, a crucial step in slowing the capsule and preventing debris from the asteroid Bennu from crashing into the Utah desert.

“Welcome home!” exclaimed at that moment Noelia González, from the NASA communications team and in charge of the Spanish broadcast of the event.

“The expectation, the excitement, the nerves are palpable in the atmosphere,” said González, while in the background you could hear the cries of joy from the NASA team at the success of the mission.

The capsule entered the atmosphere around 8:42 local time in Utah, traveling at a speed of 44,500 kilometers per hour and facing high temperatures, so it was key that it reduce its speed during the descent to Earth.

Four hours before its landing, the Osiris-Rex mother ship released the capsule into space, at a distance of exactly 102,000 kilometers from our planet, and set course for another asteroid called Apophis, which it will study for the next few years.

With the arrival of the capsule to Earth, an adventure that began in 2016 with the launch of the Osiris-Rex spacecraft from the NASA center in Cape Canaveral, Florida comes to an end. A sample of unmatched purity

Now, NASA scientists will take the capsule to an airtight room, free of any other molecules, at a nearby military base, ensuring the sample remains free of contamination.

The value of the sample is that it is not contaminated by other substances, which could provide previously unknown information. Meteorites often contain information useful to scientists, but by the time they reach Earth, this information has already been altered.

In order to study this valuable sample under ideal conditions, the capsule will be transported on Monday, September 25, by plane to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, where it will be kept in a room exclusively designated for its preservation.

However, not all of Bennu’s dust and rocks will be used for research right away.

Approximately 70% of the remains will be preserved, giving future generations of scientists the opportunity to answer the great unknowns of the origin of the universe with technology that we cannot even imagine today.

NASA brings to Earth the largest sample of an asteroid that would help decipher the origin of life and the solar system

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