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NASAscientists have finally add together how much material a spacecraftsnatched from a removed " potentially hazardous " asteroid , and it turns out they ’ve got more than double what they expect .
The sample — roughly 4.3 ounces ( 122 gramme ) of rough space junk that theOSIRIS - REx spacecraftcollected from theasteroid Bennu — could contain some of the early herald for life and is the first space rock ever recover by a NASA mission .
A close-up of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample trays, containing dust and rubble plundered from asteroid Bennu.
Afterlanding in the Utah deserton Sept. 24 , 2023 , the OSIRIS - REx condensation was taken to NASA ’s Johnson Space Center in Houston , where scientist began working to disassemble it — which proved trickier than many anticipated . Two of the capsule ’s 35fasteners got stuck , hale NASA researchers to initially only amass about 2.48 ounces ( 70.3 grams ) of sampling reside on the lid of the tin .
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Then , after specially designing and testing bespoke dick for the task , scientists finallyopened thelid ’s last two clasps . After fully disassembling it , they retrieved 1.81 ounces ( 51.2 grams ) more of the asteroid from inside .
The NASA mission launched in September 2016 and traveled 200 million miles ( 320 million kilometer ) to reach Bennu before take back to Earth with the sample in May 2021 . OSIRIS - king mission scientist spentnearly two days searchingfor a landing site on Bennu ’s craggy aerofoil before the ballistic capsule touched down to collect the sample distribution . Upon making contact with the asteroid , OSIRIS - REx give the sack a burst of nitrogen from its Touch - and - Go Sample - Acquisition Mechanism to get the landing and prevent the craft from sinking through the asteroid , as well as to capture the sampling .
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The capsule ’s long - await contents include or so 4.5 billion - year - old sway from the early years of thesolar system . They also hold some of the primal elements believe to have set off life sentence on Earth .
Some of these construction blocks — including uracil , one of the nucleobases forRNA — were also recentlyfound on the asteroid Ryuguby the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency ’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft , which returned to Earth with its rock sample distribution in 2020 . OSIRIS - REx missionary station scientist are hop to find other such biological precursors inside the Bennu sample .
