In late 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, tasked with finding clues about the origins of life on Earth, collected pieces of the solid asteroid Bennu along with its debris piles and delivered them to Earth about two months ago. On Monday, December 11, scientists received the first detailed description of part of this extraterrestrial collection.

“We certainly have a wet, organic-rich remnant of the early solar system, which is what we hoped for when we first conceived of this mission nearly 20 years ago,” Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, told the American Geophysical Union (AGU). ) conference will be held this week in California and online. “I fully expect the space chemist community to go to town on this.”

Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona, said fragments of the ancient asteroid were found far from the outer cover of the sample capsule and were rich in carbon and organic molecules. The particles are all very dark in color and consist of centimeter and millimeter sized “bumpy lumps”. It has a coarse “cauliflower-like texture,” Lauretta said. “They stick to everything we touch.”

The OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft was designed to make contact with Bennu in six seconds, but sank 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) to the asteroid’s surface in 17 seconds. A victim of its own success, the probe ejected so much material that particles began to leak out of the sample collector head, but they were still protected inside the outer cap. On Monday, Lauretta blamed a 1.3-inch (3.5 cm) rock on Bennu, which jammed a small valve in its head and allowed material to leak into the cap.

Two faulty fasteners continue to prevent technicians from removing the cap to access and catalog the bulk of the collected sample still trapped inside the head. While they wait for the new tools to be approved for use in jewelry, they use tweezers to pick tiny stones through a partially open valve. The total weight of the collected material is 70.3 grams (0.07 kg) – more than the task. . mandatory minimum of 60 grams (0.06 kg).

Some of this material was sent to the NASA-supported Reflectance Experimental Laboratory (RELAB) in Rhode Island for spectral analysis, and some was sent to the Natural History Museum in London. Initial findings using spectroscopy, a scientific method that reveals a material’s composition by examining how it reflects different wavelengths of light, show a dominant blue spectral signature. Lauretta said that this blue hue is currently unknown, but may mean that the space rocks contain more water than scientists first thought, adding that other results will be presented at a scientific meeting to be held next spring.

The material also contains high amounts of magnesium, sodium and phosphorus; This combination has confused the team so far.

“I’ve been looking at meteors for a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Lauretta said. “Now this is a puzzle. What kind of material is this?”