Matthew Powell

but indirect.

From Earth, scientists could see the surface, but that surface had been marked by billions of years of sunlight, radiation, and impact.

The birthday cake was in the picture.

Scientists just couldn't taste it.

And even when space rock did arrive on Earth as meteorites, there was another problem.

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Livermore's case for getting to study Bennu rested on a reputation built over decades.

Fortunately, that expertise connects to another Lawrence Livermore mission.

national security.

But before Bennu could be measured, it had to be protected.

Not from the world beyond Earth, but from Earth itself.

A breath, a flake of skin, a particle of dust, any of it could contaminate the sample.

By the time the sample reached Livermore, scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center had already seen the complication.

Bennu was not only one thing.

To read Bennu, they were looking for tiny differences inside the atoms themselves.

An isotopic fingerprint, a way to read where Bennu came from and what it had been through.

And when Lawrence Livermore finally measured that chemistry, all 18 isotopic systems from a fragment smaller than a coin, what they found stopped scientists in their tracks.