After months of frustration, NASA lastly bought the Bennu asteroid sample container open in January, revealing the massive quantities of asteroid scooped up by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Now, a prime member of the mission says the distant hunk of area rock could also be a planetesimal—a planet’s constructing block—that when belonged to an ocean world.
Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist on the College of Arizona and principal investigator on the OSIRIS-REx mission, told New Scientist that “my working speculation is that this was an historic ocean world.”
Whereas “extremely speculative,” as Lauretta told Space.com, that’s what the excessive ranges of phosphates within the Bennu samples are suggesting. Phosphorus is a constructing block of life and was discovered final yr being spat up by the subsurface oceans on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. As a result of water is a prerequisite for all times as we all know it, these ocean worlds are a foremost goal of missions with a watch towards astrobiology, the seek for life past Earth.
OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu, a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid, in December 2018. The spacecraft schlepped some 200 million miles to get to Bennu, which is a carbon-rich relic from the photo voltaic system’s formation. It returned to Earth in September 2023 with about 250 grams of asteroid pattern, plus one other 70 grams in bonus material discovered exterior of the pattern container. The pattern is “an astrobiologist’s dream,” according to OSIRIS-REx analyst Daniel Glavin.
What’s so thrilling about this mission is that researchers now have entry to area materials that’s unspoiled by the journey by means of Earth’s environment. Asteroids that fall to Earth as meteorites are heated up by the autumn. In the event that they don’t dissipate fully, they’re remodeled by the method, after which tainted by the terrestrial materials they fall upon. It may be troublesome to hint these meteorites again to their sources in area, whereas scientists plucked the Bennu samples straight from their splendid supply.
The Bennu samples have the potential to present us a timeline of solar system formation and reveal extra about how life arose from the cosmos’ primordial ether. Bennu is “a fossil snapshot of a few of the most primitive materials within the photo voltaic system,” Michael Wong, an astrobiologist at Carnegie Science, informed Gizmodo shortly after the samples arrived on Earth. “However a bit little bit of time elapsed between its formation and the place it basically froze out and stopped evolving as a planetary physique.”
Due to this window of change, Bennu additionally holds some clues about how comparable historic rocky our bodies can evolve. Extra evaluation of the samples—scientists solely bought the darn canister open final month, in any case—will virtually actually reveal far more.
Extra: Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Is Belching Up a Key Life Ingredient