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NASA revealed Wednesday that newly returned samples from a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid contain traces of carbon and water — molecules that are thought to make up the building blocks of life.
The findings could help scientists understand how the solar system formed and how life started on Earth.
In a much-anticipated public event, the agency provided the first glimpse of the rocky samples, detailing how early studies have already yielded exciting results. The pieces of space rock contain water molecules locked up in clay minerals and are rich in carbon, according to NASA researchers.
Astrobiologist Daniel Glavin, co-investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission that retrieved the asteroid sample, said scientists were immediately excited by the initial results.
“We picked the right asteroid. And not only that, we brought back the right sample,” Glavin said. “This stuff is an astrobiologist’s dream.”
The samples were retrieved from the surface of a near-Earth asteroid known as Bennu, which is estimated to have formed in the first 10 million years of the solar system’s existence.
More research is needed to understand the samples from Bennu, but the preliminary results are promising because the space rock’s water and carbon content may explain how water was originally delivered to Earth.
As such, the asteroid may have played a key role in how life emerged on our planet, said Dante Lauretta, leader of the OSIRIS-REx mission and a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona.
“The reason that Earth is a habitable world, that we have oceans and lakes and rivers and rain, is because these clay minerals — minerals like the ones we’re seeing from Bennu — landed on Earth 4 billion years ago to four-and-a-half billion years ago, making our world habitable,” Lauretta said.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft launched in 2016, traveling 4 billion miles over the past seven years to gather samples from Bennu and return them to Earth. As the probe flew by the planet last month, it jettisoned a capsule containing the precious samples, depositing it over a landing zone in the Utah desert.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is now en route to another asteroid known as Apophis, which is projected to come within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029. As part of an extended mission, the probe will study the space rock up close and make careful measurements of its orbit.
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