The country’s first pristine asteroid sample — protected by a heat shield invented in Silicon Valley — landed in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert this morning, where it was gre…
heat shield invented in Silicon Valley
— landed in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert Sunday morning, where it was greeted by a team of NASA scientists hoping to study its chemical composition. The sample was taken from the asteroid Bennu, where in 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched down on the asteroid’s surface to collect rock and dust. It took two years to get there and two years to measure the asteroid — and now, it has returned to Earth with a sample in tow.
“Bennu is a leftover fragment from the tumultuous formation of the solar system,” said NASA on X, formerly Twitter, around 8 a.m. “The samples will help scientists better understand the origins of our solar system, and might contain clues to the role asteroids may have played in delivering life-forming compounds to Earth.”
After being preserved in space for millennia, NASA said Bennu “is a time capsule from the early solar system,” and could perhaps contain clues to the origin of life. Portions of Bennu’s rocks and dust are now being distributed to scientists both on the NASA team and around the world, the agency said Sunday morning.
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