On Monday, the scientific community received its first description of the rare and exotic material, revealed by the mission’s top scientist, Dante Lauretta, at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. obtained.
Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, showed in a slide a long list of interesting molecules, including carbon-based organics, found in grains and pebbles recovered from Bennu. They shed light on the molecular building blocks of the solar system, “and perhaps provide insight into the origins of life, although this is still in its infancy.”
This analysis is just beginning. The research team has not yet published a formal scientific paper. In his lecture, Lauretta pointed to an interesting triangular, brightly colored rock that he said contained something he had never seen before in a meteorite.
“It’s a head-scratching situation right now. What is this material?” he said.
In an interview after the talk, Lauretta said the sample was almost 5 percent carbon. “This is an extremely carbon-rich sample, the most abundant of any extraterrestrial material. …We are still figuring out the complex organic chemistry, but it seems likely that these carbon-rich asteroids could support life.” It seems promising to really understand: “Did they introduce fundamental molecules that may have contributed to the origin of the world?” ”
Lauretta said the laboratory analyzes are looking for other molecules and compounds important to life on Earth, such as amino acids, lipids, sugars and the basis of the genetic code, adding: The results so far are interesting.team He said the report was still being refined and would be discussed at a scientific conference early next year.
NASA chose to send a probe to Bennu because it is potentially the most dangerous asteroid in the solar system. Its orbit around the sun is similar to the Earth’s orbit. A rock about three-tenths of a mile across (big enough to attract attention, but not big enough to cause an extinction-level impact) crosses the Earth every six years. Orbital path.
a calculation A paper published in 2021 estimates that the probability that Bennu will hit Earth in September 2182 is 1 in 2,700. This estimate will be refined after the asteroid’s close approach in 2135.
If it’s highly unlikely that Earthlings are going to try to throw a rock off course, they definitely want to know exactly what they’re hitting. Telescopes don’t provide as much information as robotic visitors. Hence OSIRIS-REx (which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer).
Even before scientists began analyzing the samples, one thing was firmly established. It turns out that Bennu is very black.
“It’s super black. It’s so dark that it’s hard to take pictures,” project scientist Jason Dworkin said ahead of the meeting. The materials include “all kinds of different shades of black.” In addition, there is a mysterious glow of yellow, red and pink, he added.
Materials equivalent to a career
NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2016, and it arrived at Bennu in 2018. In 2020, it used a sampling device at the end of its robotic arm to perform a series of delicate maneuvers that brought it into contact with the asteroid. The arm unexpectedly plunged deep into the asteroid, which turned out to be what scientists call a debris pile, made of material loosely clumped together by gravity.
The spacecraft then returned to Earth’s vicinity and released a capsule containing the sample. On September 24th, it landed almost perfectly on target at a military bombing range in western Utah. The capsule appeared unstressed by the long voyage, and was actually sitting upright on the desert floor, just a few steps from the road.
The carefully sealed capsule was transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Next came the delicate task of recovering materials from Bennu. Inside the capsule was a canister that held a sampling device. The canister was opened, but sampling equipment proved uncooperative. Specially designed, he was sealed with 35 fasteners, two of which did not budge.
NASA is designing a new tool that could get the job done in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, according to some information, NASA blog postthe sampling device is transferred to a separate container and “enclosed in a sealed Teflon bag to ensure that the sample remains safe in a stable, nitrogen-rich environment.”
Still, no one panicked. Team members found that it was possible to use tweezers and a shovel to extract some of the material trapped inside the device. As a result, the team obtained a sample weighing 70 grams, exceeding the official mission requirement of 60 grams.
“This is career-worthy material for thousands of researchers around the world. So we’re overjoyed,” Lauretta said. “I fully expect the astrochemistry community to be active on this matter.”
“We’re getting a lot of information from a very small sample,” NASA astrobiologist Danny Glavine said ahead of the conference.
Scientists believe that Bennu is a fragment of a larger celestial body that was shattered in an impact early in the solar system’s history. The parent body is thought to have been heated by radioactive decay, reaching a temperature high enough for the water inside to become liquid.
“If you add water, a lot of interesting chemical reactions will occur,” Glavin says.
I’m not biased when I say that chemistry becomes more interesting when you somehow create living things. Paleontologists know that life existed on Earth as bacteria at least 3.5 billion years ago. This happened relatively soon after the Earth survived a long and violent collision with rocks that littered the solar system during its early years.
It is unlikely that life existed in Bennu’s mother body, but it may have cooked up interesting compounds similar to those that form the building blocks of life on Earth, and as Dworkin puts it, it “happens.” It must have started with a chemical reaction” in space. “
But the chemistry of prebiotics is far removed from bacteria, Dworkin said, and is “about the same as a bottle of vitamins at Thanksgiving dinner.”
However, this cosmic dirt has astrobiological implications. By examining Bennu’s prebiotic chemistry, scientists can better understand what they are looking for when they find suspicious molecules elsewhere in the solar system, including on Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa, and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. You will be able to understand it better.
“This is almost perfect laboratory control with abiotic chemistry,” Glavin says. “This sets the stage for the search for life on Mars, Europa, Enceladus, and other places where life may once have existed.”