Samples From Bennu Asteroid Delivered To Earth

I had missed this earlier, but on Sunday, samples recovered from the asteroid Bennu were dropped in a small capsule onto the Utah desert and recovered by NASA. 

    The samples were gathered from the surface of a near-Earth asteroid known as Bennu. The space rock, which is roughly as tall as the Empire State Building, is located more than 200 million miles away from Earth but orbits in such a way that it occasionally swings within 4.6 million miles of the planet.

    Bennu’s main draw owes to its age. The asteroid is estimated to have formed in the first 10 million years of the solar system’s existence, making it a pristine remnant from a chaotic time more than 4.5 billion years ago. As such, studying an asteroid’s chemical and physical properties is thought to be one of the best ways to understand the earliest days of the solar system.

    “They’re pretty well untouched from right around 4.5 billion years ago,” Betts said. “To get insights into these rocks gives real power to not just the science of asteroids but to everything in our solar system.”

    Researchers are keen to understand what role — if any — asteroids played in the emergence of life on Earth. There are theories, for instance, that asteroids and comets may have delivered water and other building blocks of life to the planet.

The samples were collected by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft which launched in 2016, arrived at Bennu in 2018, touched down on Bennu's surface in 2020, and left to return to Earth in 2021. The samples were taken to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas on Monday.