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NASA’sOSIRIS - Rexasteroid - try mission , tasked with finding hints about the origins of lifetime on our major planet , has take back to Earth from a seven - yr journey to the other side of thesolar system .
The billion - dollar bill spacecraft fired its descent capsule from a meridian of just about 63,000 miles ( 102,000 kilometers ) above Earth Sunday ( Sept. 24 ) , send the capsule thrust through the atmosphere at speeds of up to 27,000 miles per hour ( 43,000 kilometer / h ) before it slowed and deploy parachutes to land in the Utah desert at 10:53 a.m. EDT ( 15:53 GMT ) .
The sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is seen shortly after touching down in the desert, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023, at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range.
Inside the abridgement is 2 ounces ( 60 g ) of rocky space junk from Bennu , apotentially hazardous near Earth asteroidthat has a1 - in-2,700 chanceof strike Earth in the class 2182 — the high odds of any be intimate infinite object . Yet what ’s ensnare inside the ejection seat ’s rocks is of far more sake : the possible extraterrestrial herald of sprightliness on Earth .
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" The ultimate [ proverbial ] cultivated carrot is the search for the author of life , " Queen guitar player Brian May , who has a doctorate in astrophysics and was involved with the foreign mission , tell Live Science . " This is what fires us all up , I think , and it ’s a possibleness that this labor might contribute to that . "
A mosaic image of asteroid Bennu made by OSIRIS-REx.
Slingshot to a distant asteroid
shoot off from Cape Canaveral , Florida , in September 2016 , the new wave - sized OSIRIS - REx ( scant for " Origins , Spectral Interpretation , Resource Identification , Security - Regolith Explorer " ) spent the next year performing a tight flyby of Earth . At its nearest approach above Antarctica , the space vehicle flew roughly 10,700 miles ( 17,200 klick ) overhead — a manoeuvre that enable it to slingshot itself to Bennu by increase its speed by 8,451 miles per hour ( 13,601 km / h ) .
Because of the so - called Yarkovsky effect ( named after the 19th - 100 engineer who first advise it ) space rocks such as asteroids , over long periods of meter , absorb and emit enough momentum - carry illumination to change their orbits .
Quantifying the Yarkovsky effect is crucial to predicting which asteroid are potentially hazardous and whether Bennu will slam into Earth or narrowly miss it . To land the ballistic capsule on Bennu , OSIRIS - REx ’s scientist made the most accurate measure of the phenomenon yet .
An image of OSIRIS-REx’s landing site, named Nightingale, on the asteroid Bennu.
Landing on a god of creation
Viewed from afar , Bennu ( named after an Egyptian god of creation ) await like an torpid , rubble - fleckedspinning topsuspended in distance . categorise as a rubble - pile asteroid , Bennu is an 85.5 million - ton ( 77.5 million metric tons ) collection of tilt chunk and boulders barely held together by weak gravitational attraction — a cosmic egg pit that swallows any object that lands too hard on its surface and place anything that spring too forcefully from it careering into space .
Yet draw closer , as OSIRIS - REx did onits first coming in 2018 , and an altogether strange picture emerges . Veins of carbonate rock ‘n’ roll 3 feet ( 0.9 meters ) long crisscross a surface splatter with carbon copy - ample constitutional material . This is evidence that Bennu ’s parent organic structure — a 60 - mile - wide ( 96 kilometre ) aim that formed during the early eld of thesolar systemand split roughly 1 billion years ago to form the asteroid — was once home to torrent of red-hot water and the earliest building block of aliveness .
land on Bennu ’s craggy face proved to be a great challenge for the mission scientists , who poke at OSIRIS - REx into a record - split up orbit ( Bennu is the smallest aim to be orbited by a spacecraft ) around the asteroid for 22 months before they find a safe landing place outer space free of boulder . The investigator settled on a site they name Nightingale , which OSIRIS - REx touched down upon on Oct. 20 , 2020 .
An image of the rocks from Bennu’s rubble-pile surface flying in all directions as OSIRIS-REx touches down. Some of the asteroid’s surface, or regolith, was captured inside the spacecraft’s sample retrieval container.
The safe landing would not have been possible withouthelp from May and his collaborationist Claudia Manzoni , who bring forth uncounted stereoscopic images of Bennu , turn on the team to see the asteroid in 3D and pick a flat landing place land site .
May and mission leaderDante Lauretta , a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona , first met at the U.N. ’s annual International Asteroid Day . After the OSIRIS - king scientist released their first range of Bennu online , May emailed Lauretta a stereoscopic figure he had made to deliver the asteroid ’s surface in 3D.
" As we started to get into the challenge of finding a sample locating , I just know we require to see the surface in three dimension , " Lauretta told Live Science . " So I put out the call to Brian [ May ] . I figured , he ’s a interfering guy ; he ’s find a lot of things going on in his life sentence ; he was just having fun with our data . But they stepped in and did a fantastic problem .
OSIRIS-REx floats above Bennu’s surface in this artist’s illustration.
" I sent him co-ordinate after co-ordinate , " Lauretta lend . " We went through over 50 locating on the asteroid surface , and Brian and Claudia swear out every one of them . And it play a decisive role in sampling site selection . "
With the landing site fixed , OSIRIS - REx descended to Bennu ’s surface . Upon contact , it terminate a burst of nitrogen from its Touch - and - Go Sample - Acquisition chemical mechanism — not only to stick the landing but to prevent the craft from fall off through the asteroid . The blast sent rocks and dust wobble around the craft , and some of that bouldered debris was collected in a tin aboard OSIRIS - king .
A by and by outburst from OSIRIS - REx ’s thrusters after lifted it from Bennu , and the ship fill out a turn of flyovers before leaving the asteroid for Earth in May 2021 .
Now that the descent capsule has safely landed in the Utah desert , the samples will be carefully collected to void any pic to outside contamination and then sent to multiple labs for depth psychology .
Finding life in space
The next whole step is to regain out what the Bennu sample are made of . base on look-alike , scientists think the sample contains a premix of detritus and tilt types ; some of which are so fragile that they would never attain our planet as meteors , the deputation scientist previously told Live Science .
retiring analysis of meteorites found on Earth have reveal that rock that fell to our planetcontained the five nucleobasesessential for work up life using DNA and RNA : adenine ( A ) , G ( G ) , thymine ( T ) , C ( C ) and uracil ( U ) . But scientist were n’t trusted whether these molecules came from infinite or if they were contaminant from Earth ’s atmosphere .
Then , earlier this year , scientist with Japan ’s Hayabusa2 missionary station to the asteroid Ryugurevealed that the RNA nucleobase U is presenton that space rock ’s airfoil . Ryugu , like Bennu , is a rubble - heap asteroid , so finding uracil or the other radical on Bennu may suggest that these forerunner to life are typical features on such asteroids .
How biography ’s construction cylinder block might have formed on Ryugu , or in the interstellar cloud that would afterward birth it and the rest of oursolar system , is n’t well understood . However , some scientists think aminic Elvis and nucleotides could have been made when interstellar ice-skating rink was nuke with intense cosmic rays : breaking down the simple speck entrap within and reconstituting them into more complex configurations .
These molecules may have finally hitched a ride to Earth via meteorite impacts , where they spark off the first stirrings of life in primordial ocean .
— piece of asteroid Ryugu are among ' most primeval ' material ever examined
— Boulders on Ryugu are amazingly downy , place investigation finds
— Asteroid Ryugu ’s weird spinning - top shape explain
Now that it has put down , the extraction capsule will be carry to a fair room before the sample capsule is removed and stored inside a atomic number 1 purge to prevent contamination . On Sept. 25 , the capsule will be flown to a curation lab at NASA ’s Johnson Space Center in Houston .
NASA project to reveal the samples to the populace on Oct. 11 and send some to labs around the worldly concern . If animation ’s harbinger lurk within them , we will likely know in the next twosome of years .
" If we in reality had a string of nucleic acid , which is a fairly complicated corpuscle , that would be revolutionary , like maybeNobel Prize - level skill , " Lauretta say . " So we ’re looking more for the building block — the pieces that might have come together to build RNA and DNA and protein . We do n’t expect to recover actual biomolecules . "
This is n’t the end of OSIRIS - REx ’s escape . After liberate its declension ejector seat , the asteroid chaser zipped past Earth to its next mark , Apophis . This potentially hazardous near - Earth asteroid is also oppressed with challenging subsurface materials that OSIRIS - REx is set to seize in 2029 .
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