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Chapter 1: What significant event occurred in September 2023 regarding the Bennu asteroid?
In a remote corner of Utah, a distant boom rolls across the desert. A capsule only 32 inches wide has just separated from NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and entered Earth's atmosphere.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx, the first-ever U.S.
mission to collect a sample from an asteroid returning to Earth.
After a round-trip journey of more than 2 billion miles, the capsule hits the desert floor and the recovery team moves in carefully. Fast forward three months and the desert sand has given way to white surfaces, sealed containers, and the sound of people taking every precaution to protect what NASA spent seven years to bring home. A scientist reaches for the sample container.
slowly because he knows it's impossible to replace.
I was using a gloved hand due to contamination issues, but it was pretty spectacular. We really are looking at something that has changed very, very little since its inception.
The object in that room was a delivery four and a half billion years in the making. And somewhere inside it, written in chemistry, may be the story of where everything began. The next challenge, reading it. NASA partnered with a team that could measure what almost no one else on Earth could, a sample from the Bennu asteroid.
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Chapter 2: How did NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission collect samples from Bennu?
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In the early 2000s, a team of planetary scientists at NASA began planning something audacious. They would build a spacecraft, aim it at an asteroid, launch it across more than a billion miles of space, map the asteroid's rugged terrain at an unprecedented centimeter level resolution, hover over the surface to collect a sample, and bring it all the way home. The mission was called OSIRIS-REx.
The target was Bennu.
Any moment now, NASA will launch a space probe that will embark on a seven year mission. Five, four, three, two, one. Osiris-Rex. And liftoff of Osiris-Rex. It's seven year mission to boldly go to the asteroid venue and back.
In September 2016, the spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral. It would take nearly five years to reach the asteroid, map it, collect a sample, and begin the journey back. The question driving the mission is one that humanity has asked since its inception.
curiosity of where we came from and where the ingredients in our solar system came from and what they were. Where we came from as humans, where we came from as planets.
Greg Brenica is a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
One of the ways to do that is to look at samples that formed in the early solar system and analyze them and figure out when it happened, where it happened, and what it's made from.
Greg has spent his career studying meteorites. rocks from space that have landed on Earth, and the answers they may reveal about the solar system's beginning. Bennu is roughly as wide as the Empire State Building is tall, a rubble pile held together by its own gravity. Never melted, never differentiated into a core, a mantle, or a crust, never weathered by Earth's wind, oceans, or atmosphere.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did scientists face when analyzing the Bennu samples?
Sample collection is complete. And the faculty burn has expired.
It's a very cool way of collecting a sample, actually. So there was a spacecraft that was orbiting the asteroid. The scientists decided this is an area we want to land. It's safe and it has the stuff that we want to collect. So they picked an area that they knew they could get out of that wasn't near a lot of large boulders.
They basically went down and essentially looks like a pogo stick, fired the retro rockets and blasted off of the asteroid.
In October of 2020, the long journey back into Earth's atmosphere began. Three years through the vacuum. But before it ever arrived, the mission was entering its next phase, finding someone on Earth who could actually interpret the material.
I kind of like to think of this as if somebody sends you a picture of a birthday cake, you can kind of tell what that birthday cake is made of. You may have an idea about what it tastes like. You don't really know. And we can take pictures of a lot of asteroids. We can take pictures of distant planets. We can have ideas about what they're made from.
But we don't really know until we get it in the laboratory and really analyze it. You don't really know until you have that birthday cake in front of you and you can taste it.
For decades, telescopes revealed spectra. Wavelengths of light reflected off asteroid surfaces. Useful. Suggestive. 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.
all the meteorites that we have on Earth have passed through Earth's atmosphere and have landed on Earth. And that in itself contaminates that sample. And particularly for this mission, it was really important to have an uncontaminated sample because what they were looking at, in addition to the chemical and isotopic compositions that Livermore was involved in,
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Chapter 4: What makes Bennu a unique object in our solar system?
And we are world experts here at the lab in analyzing very small samples with very advanced analytical tools. And that specifically is related to the ability to measure isotopes in these rocks using mass spectrometers. And these isotopes then in turn tell you about where the material formed, how it formed, and when it formed.
Fortunately, that expertise connects to another Lawrence Livermore mission. national security.
There's a great handshake between nuclear forensics and cosmochemistry because we are always pushing the boundary on what we can measure and getting better at it by looking at these really small samples that we see oftentimes in cosmochemistry. You want to find out where it came from. You want to find out how old it is. You want to find out what it's made from.
Those are also the same types of questions that we ask in nuclear forensics.
But before Bennu could be measured, it had to be protected. Not from the world beyond Earth, but from Earth itself.
This is done under very clean conditions in a clean lab that is filled with air, HEPA filters. And the reason for that is that we need to prevent any contamination from the Earth from being added to that sample. So we want to keep our environmental background levels very low.
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.
When the sample returned back to Earth and they were able to open the canister, it became pretty obvious just with the naked eye that you could see there were slight differences in different lithologies, which is basically rock type that we're seeing in the sample.
And of course, this gave everyone pause and we thought, OK, well, we need to measure each individual rock type to see how different they are. Each lithology could carry a slightly different history, and each one needed to be decoded.
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Chapter 5: How do isotopes help us understand the origins of Bennu?
It's also very similar to CI chondrites, a rare class of primitive meteorites, and the most unprocessed material in any known collection on Earth.
It is really a special class, and there's only very little material of that in collections on Earth. And on top of that... The material, of course, that's returned by a spacecraft is much more pristine, because when a meteorite falls on Earth, it has to pass through the atmosphere.
All while Lawrence Livermore was tracing isotopic fingerprints, placing Bennu's origin and confirming chemistry, another team was working on the same sample. Because inside Bennu's dust, scientists were not only finding chemistry from the birth of the solar system, They were finding chemistry that is relevant for life.
You have a lot of amino acids. You have all five of the nucleotide bases of DNA and RNA. You have the sugar backbones. These are all contained in meteorites, and we found these in the Bennu samples. Our colleagues have found essentially all the components of DNA and RNA in the Bennu sample. And that's just super exciting.
If you talk about origins, about where the ingredients for life may have come from or developed, that's pretty exciting to be able to find those in space rocks.
Not life itself. not evidence of organisms, but molecular building blocks used by life on Earth, found in a rock from outer space that's never touched Earth's atmosphere.
That's quite remarkable, because that means that even though, as of now, we only know for certain that life exists on Earth, at least some of the building blocks for life are also present in these meteorites. And what that exactly means, I think we don't know yet, but it is certainly a worthwhile pursuit.
Not every answer locked away inside Bennu will come from the first round of analysis. Most of the asteroid sample is sealed at NASA's Johnson Space Center, saved for scientists who will have better tools, sharper methods, and questions no one has thought to ask yet.
You look at the Apollo samples that were brought back in the 1960s and 70s, and we're still uncovering secrets from those samples. We're still learning a ton about the moon from the Apollo samples. And when you archive samples like this, it allows people in the future to look at them with better instrumentation.
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Chapter 6: What surprising similarities were found between Bennu and the Sun?
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