NASA’s First Asteroid Sample Has Landed, Now Secure in Clean Room
NASA’s First Asteroid Sample Has Landed, Now Secure in Clean Room
After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, in a...
To my knowledge, this is the second time a sample is returned from an asteroid to Earth - only preceded by Hayabusa-2 fetching a sample from asteroid Ryugu. The capsule has been found and the sample stabilized with nitrogen. Fetching the sample required 7 years, studying it will require a bit of time too.
It is too early to speculate whether interesting discoveries will follow, but Bennu is considered to be an interesting asteroid - likely not a break-up product, but something that represents the original composition of the solar system.
Bennu is also considered a hazardous space object, ranked high on the Palermo scale of impact risk and kinetic yield, so knowing what it's made of can be practically worthwhile.
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