NASA’s first successful recovery of asteroid samples may reveal information about the origins of the universe

The OSIRIS-REx mission is NASA’s first mission to gather samples from an asteroid—on this case 101955 Bennu—and return to Earth.

OSIRIS-REx is an acronym for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Useful resource Identification, and Safety—Regolith Explorer. The sealed capsule landed on Sept. 24 close to Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah, a feat that was broadcast reside by NASA.

My analysis investigates geologic samples in craters fashioned by meteorite collisions on Earth. These samples embody supplies that may be discovered on different planetary bodies just like the moon, Mars and asteroids.

Asteroid samples

Planning for the OSIRIS-REx mission dates back to the 2010s, however the imaginative and prescient of a mission to deliver again samples of an asteroid goes again even additional.

The significance of planetary pattern return missions was already being acknowledged within the Sixties, through the Apollo era, with the gathering of several suites of lunar rock samples by astronauts.

In 1986, comet Halley’s close approach to Earth sparked an curiosity within the international scientific group to discover planetary objects like comets and asteroids. The European House Company’s Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which additionally carried out fly-bys of two asteroids on the journey, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company’s (JAXA) Hayabusa 1 and Hayabusa 2 missions to near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are among the essential milestones that laid the inspiration for exploratory missions to comets and asteroids.

Asteroid Bennu was chosen by NASA for the OSIRIS-REx mission after rigorous discussions that thought-about the scientific and engineering capabilities of the mission. Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) that has been studied extensively by Earth-based telescopic observations within the final twenty years, making it a strategic goal for an exploratory mission.

Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid—a category of asteroids that include a high amount of carbon. Additionally it is pristine, which means that its materials was created within the early phases of solar system formation and is preserved in an unaltered situation.

Mission significance

The query of how life got here to be on Earth has fascinated individuals for a long time. Understanding the origin and historical past of the Earth can make clear how life on Earth started.

Earth has a really dynamic surroundings, from a thick environment to a really lively biosphere and an enormous expanse of water oceans. Most materials on Earth that was current when the Earth first fashioned has been considerably modified by dynamic processes like weathering and erosion by parts like water or wind, lively plate tectonics, lively volcanism, in addition to human actions comparable to mining or excavation.

Asteroids, alternatively, have little or no to no modification since their formation, going again to the time of the formation of our solar system.

Items of asteroids, and different planetary our bodies such because the moon or Mars, land on the Earth’s floor, within the type of meteorites, almost every year. These meteorites are invaluable to our data of the solar system, however most of those samples originate from unknown sources.

Recognized sources

A deliberate robotic mission to deliver a pattern from an asteroid ensures that the supply of the fabric is thought and can assist correlate the data gained from previous studies of unknown samples, in addition to distant observations of the asteroid to direct observations from collected samples.

Particularly, as asteroid Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid, analyses of its samples can result in a better data of pristine carbon in our solar system and enhance our understanding of the position that asteroids could have performed within the origin of life on Earth.

OSIRIS-REx was not the primary international asteroid pattern return mission. In 2010, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company accomplished the first asteroid sample return mission, Hayabusa 1, that introduced again a sample weighing less than one gram from the asteroid Itokawa. Extra lately, in 2020, Hayabusa 2 returned from asteroid 162173 Ryugu with a 5.4g soil sample.

The Hayabusa 2 mission has already resulted in analysis revealing the character of some of the oldest known materials in our solar system.

A continued search

The OSIRIS-REx mission continues to discover space. The spacecraft has been rebranded as OSIRIS-APEX, and is currently on its way to the asteroid Apophis on an almost six-year lengthy journey to conduct a fly-by of the asteroid.

Improvements required for the exploration of space and planetary our bodies have traditionally been proven to benefit life on Earth.

For instance, satellite know-how, an idea that we rely so closely upon in our day by day lives—from navigation programs in addition to national security or monitoring of pure landforms and ecosystems—is a product of space exploration.

As we try to enterprise deeper into the outer space, we are able to anticipate to see extra artistic technological developments that can finally assist clear up issues on Earth.

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