It’s official: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft snagged 121.6 grams of pristine house rocks when it bopped the asteroid Bennu 4 years in the past, greater than double the mission’s official science purpose, the company confirmed February 15.
Launched in 2016, OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first mission to gather samples from an asteroid and return them to Earth so scientists can examine our photo voltaic system’s origins. After performing its grab-and-go process from the diamond-shaped Bennu, the spacecraft dropped its canister into our environment final 12 months (SN: 9/22/23). Engineers swiftly shuttled it off to a specifically designed pattern curation middle on the Johnson House Middle in Houston, the place it was positioned in a airtight glove field to forestall contamination by terrestrial materials.
Whereas researchers have been in a position to analyze some rocks and mud already, weighing the complete pattern has been delayed by a pair caught screws that prevented anybody from accessing all the contents of the capsule (SN: 10/11/23). Some intelligent workarounds lastly unlocked the complete pattern on January 10, and it’ll now be distributed to scientists around the globe for examine.
To find out how engineers obtained the canister open, in addition to what sorts of science the pattern will educate us, Science Information spoke with Harold Connolly, a geologist at Rowan College in Glassboro, N.J., who oversees evaluation of the fabric from Bennu. The dialog has been edited for readability and brevity.
SN: Shortly after retrieving the OSIRIS-REx canister, you had been in a position to acquire some pattern, proper?
Connolly: There was a lot of mud on the surface of the canister. That was the primary materials we obtained, roughly 1 to 1.1 grams or so of positive mud particles.
SN: What sorts of issues did you face earlier than you might totally open the principle pattern container?
Connolly: There’s a bunch of fasteners or screws holding the container closed, roughly 32 of them. And two of them we couldn’t loosen sufficient with the gear we had. However there’s a mylar flap that strikes, which trapped the pattern in a container. The curation staff on the Johnson House Middle discovered it may simply push down the flap. With out eradicating the plate that was caught, the staff may get pattern out from contained in the TAGSAM [Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism] head by actually pushing down the mylar flap and scooping it out very gently. We obtained 70 grams of pattern — rather a lot.
However to entry the remainder of the pattern, they needed to create a brand new type of ratchet wrench screwdriver. The earlier screwdriver was beginning to flex just a little bit, so that you could be breaking the screwdriver.
SN: Are you able to inform me something about what you’ve discovered from the pattern you’ve gotten to this point?
Connolly: It’s a serpentinite. It’s an altered rock the place the unique rocky materials has interacted with water, and that unique rocky materials will need to have been wealthy in olivine and pyroxene and another widespread rock-forming minerals on Earth, however modified and altered in a ravishing means. That may be a geologic puzzle to determine.
SN: What have we suspected in regards to the historical past of Bennu that the pattern helps to verify?
Connolly: Oh, there’s rather a lot.
Bennu itself is in a configuration that isn’t what it initially was. As soon as upon a time, the items that turned Bennu had been in a a lot totally different object, in all probability a heck of rather a lot greater. We’re speaking quickly after the photo voltaic system shaped, 4.5 billion years in the past.
When that object shaped, materials got here collectively, introduced ices with it — and never simply water ice, however carbon monoxide and ammonia ice — which implies it needed to accrete someplace out previous what we name the snow line, out previous Mars within the outer photo voltaic system. At that distance from the solar, temperatures are low sufficient for these ices to type.
Finally, the inside of the bigger, unique object began to warmth up due to radioactivity that’s naturally within the materials, and that started to soften the ice and turn out to be fluid. Fluid started to work together with the guardian physique to type new minerals — like serpentinite — from the fabric that accreted.
We’ll be teasing out how a lot of it was altered, how a lot is relic from the pre-accretion stage, how a lot is definitely from stars that died and injected mud into our photo voltaic system.
SN: It feels like a dynamic and sophisticated historical past.
Connolly: We’re focused on what occurred: How did that unique guardian physique change? Was it impacted by one other physique and smashed aside to create the bigger boulders that finally got here collectively to type Bennu? And the way lengthy has Bennu been on this present configuration? How a lot had it skilled interplay with the solar or with cosmic rays? All these sorts of processes we are able to tease out by analyzing teeny tiny little bits of pattern.
SN: Do we’ve any solutions to any of those questions?
Connolly: Keep tuned.
