NASA scientists recently conducted a study on asteroid rocks that their spacecraft took from a distant “potentially hazardous” asteroid. The findings show that the spacecraft managed to capture a significant portion of the asteroid, almost twice as much as expected.
In 2023, the OSIRIS-REx capsule was transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston after landing in the Utah desert on September 24. At the center, researchers began the work of separating the capsules, which turned out to be trickier than expected as they separated the two capsules. 35 fasteners were stuck. Therefore, NASA scientists were initially only able to collect the 2.48 ounces (70.3 g) of sample that was lying on the lid of the canister.
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Success in the capsule was achieved only after several unsuccessful attempts to open it with specially designed and tested special equipment. Once scientists opened the last two clasps of the lid, they retrieved 1.81 ounces (51.2 g) more of asteroid material from inside the canister.
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The space agency’s 2016 mission, which launched in September, traveled 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) to reach Bennu before returning to the home planet, Earth. NASA mission scientists spent nearly two years searching for a suitable landing site on Bennu’s rugged surface to collect samples from the asteroid.
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The asteroid sample contained about 4.3 ounces (122 grams) of rocky space debris, almost twice as much as expected.
OSIRIS-REx released a blast of nitrogen from its touch-and-go sample-acquisition mechanism upon making its first contact with the asteroid. This nitrogen shot was to ensure a precise landing of the spacecraft, to prevent it from sinking through the asteroid and thus holding the sample.
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Rock material may reveal earliest signs of life
The OSIRIS-REx mission is NASA’s first spacecraft to retrieve rocky space material from asteroid Bennu that could potentially yield information about the earliest signs needed for life. It turned out that the sample contained rocks about 4.5 billion years old, dating back to the early years of the solar system. Samples of the primitive elements that are believed to have given rise to life on Earth were also found in the sample.
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Additionally, in 2020, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft also found, on the asteroid Ryugu, some of the building blocks of life including uracil which is one of the nucleobases for RNA. Researchers on the OSIRIS-REx mission also hope to find other such biological precursors inside the Bennu sample.
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Published: Feb 21, 2024, 11:47 am IST
