NASA delivers bounty of asteroid samples to Earth

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https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-delivers-bounty-asteroid-samples-earth

By PAUL VOOSEN, Science. 

Excerpt: ...today, after detaching from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, a capsule carrying asteroid samples descended gently by parachute before touching down in the Utah desert. The cupful of pebbles and grit it delivered—the culmination of 7 years of effort and $1 billion of expense—is only the third sample of an asteroid ever returned to Earth, and it’s the largest haul of extraterrestrial material NASA has collected since the Apollo Moon missions. ...In 2020, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft returned some 5 grams of material from Ryugu, another carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid, which was thought to be relatively dry. Instead, it appears to have been fully altered by water. “We were all terribly wrong about Ryugu,” says Edward Young, a cosmochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles. ...If they are wrong about Bennu, it will be the opposite mistake. Remote observations suggest some 10% of Bennu’s mass is made up of water locked in clays. ...As it orbited Bennu, OSIRIS-REx glimpsed another sign of a watery past: meter-long veins of carbonate, a mineral that precipitates out of solution. The water may have flowed on Bennu’s parent body, which likely formed beyond Jupiter’s orbit, at the Solar System’s very beginning 4.56 billion years ago. See also NASA OSIRIS-Rex overview and science briefing videos....

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