NASA Presents First Look at Asteroid Bennu Samples

As scheduled when the OSIRIS-REx sample return was opened, NASA had a presentation today to give a summary of the preliminary analysis results on the makeup of the samples they flew back from Bennu.   

"Boy, did we really nail it," said Dante Lauretta, a scientist from the University of Arizona who is the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission.

They haven't opened the main container, yet.  That process will unfold - slowly and meticulously - over the course of the next several weeks.  

Before the launch of this mission, scientists said the recovery of 60 grams of material would be considered a success. While the effort to determine the overall mass is ongoing, Lauretta said early estimates are that the asteroid capture mission collected about 250 grams of pebbles and dust from the surface of Bennu.

As you can see, that 250 gram number isn't measured, and it was calculated while the spacecraft was still far out there.  That will be very carefully weighed and some of it distributed to 230 scientists across 35 countries who are members of the OSIRIS-REx team.  

So what did they find that got that enthusiastic reaction from Dante Lauretta?  Lots of carbon and lots of water; both of these essential to the development of life.

In a preliminary analysis of some of the dust, Lauretta said scientists hit the jackpot with a sample that is nearly 5 percent carbon by mass and has abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals. It is highly plausible that asteroids like this delivered the vast majority of the water now found in Earth's oceans, lakes, and rivers billions of years ago.
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"This is incredible material," said Daniel Glavin, a co-investigator on the mission. "It’s loaded with organics. If we're looking for biologically essential organic molecules, we picked the right asteroid, and we brought back the right sample. This is an astrobiologist's dream."

OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return lid opening at Building 31 Astromaterials Curation Facility at Johnson Space Center. Image credit: Robert Markowitz/NASA

As we've mentioned before, these aren't the first samples from an asteroid returned to Earth.  

The Japanese space agency JAXA has led in this area. Its small Hayabusa 1 spacecraft returned 1,500 tiny asteroid grains to Earth in 2010, and a decade later, the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft returned more, about 5 grams, to Earth. 

With that estimated 250 grams from OSIRIS-REx, many more researchers will be able to work on samples from Bennu than those two Hayabusa missions, multiplying the knowledge that we can obtain from a mission like this.