NASA grabbed a whopping 120 grams of rubble from asteroid Bennu, and it may contain the seeds of life

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By Ben Turner
published

NASA's final tally shows that OSIRIS-REx collected roughly 4 ounces (120 grams) of material from asteroid Bennu. The sample collected from the "potentially hazardous" asteroid is thought to contain some of the earliest precursors for life.

A close-up of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample trays, containing dust and rubble plundered from asteroid Bennu.
A close-up of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample trays, containing dust and rubble plundered from asteroid Bennu. (Image credit: NASA/Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebersold)

NASA scientists have finally tallied how much material a spacecraftsnatched from a distant "potentially hazardous" asteroid, and it turns out they've got more than double what they expected.

The sample — roughly 4.3 ounces (122 grams) of rocky space rubble that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected from the asteroid Bennu — could contain some of the earliest precursors for life and is the first space rock ever retrieved by a NASA mission.

After landing in the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023, the OSIRIS-REx capsule was taken to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where scientists began working to disassemble it — which proved trickier than many anticipated. Two of the capsule's 35 fasteners got stuck, forcing  NASA researchers to initially only collect about 2.48 ounces (70.3 grams) of sample resting on the lid of the canister.

Related: Asteroid Bennu may be 'a fragment of an ancient ocean world', 1st sample analysis suggests

Then, after specially designing and testing bespoke tools for the task, scientists finally opened the lid's last two clasps. After fully disassembling it, they retrieved 1.81 ounces (51.2 grams) more of the asteroid from inside.

The NASA mission launched in September 2016 and traveled 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) to reach Bennu before returning to Earth with the sample in May 2021. OSIRIS-REx mission scientists spent nearly two years searching for a landing site on Bennu's craggy surface before the spacecraft touched down to collect the sample. Upon making contact with the asteroid, OSIRIS-REx fired a burst of nitrogen from its Touch-and-Go Sample-Acquisition Mechanism to stick the landing and prevent the craft from sinking through the asteroid, as well as to capture the sample.

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The capsule's long-awaited contents include roughly 4.5 billion-year-old rocks from the earliest years of the solar system. They also contain some of the primordial elements believed to have sparked life on Earth.

Some of these building blocks — including uracil, one of the nucleobases for RNA — were also recently found on the asteroid Ryugu by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft, which returned to Earth with its rock sample in 2020. OSIRIS-REx mission scientists are hoping to find other such biological precursors inside the Bennu sample. 

Ben Turner
Ben Turner
Staff Writer

Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Ratwrangler
    Just because they found a couple of compounds commonly called "organic" does not mean that life ever existed at or around this chunk of rock. These compounds are naturally occurring under many conditions, and we have yet to witness any actually forming a lifeform of any kind. As far as we know, that experiment was successful once in the entire history of our planet.
    Reply
  • ManicSidski
    Ratwrangler said:
    Just because they found a couple of compounds commonly called "organic" does not mean that life ever existed at or around this chunk of rock. These compounds are naturally occurring under many conditions, and we have yet to witness any actually forming a lifeform of any kind. As far as we know, that experiment was successful once in the entire history of our planet.
    I agree it doesn't prove anything about life existing on this lump of rock, BUT it does go a way towards supporting one of the hypothesis I have always liked and that is the one of Panspermia. I have always believed it made sense that the building blocks of life are right there in the universe and under the right circumstances a comet/ asteroid or whatever crashing into a planet within the goldilocks zone (or maybe even in areas we don't expect life) could quite easily be the catalyst for life to form on that planet. I do feel we are at the very early stages of understanding the universe, but I still feel that with the knowledge we have of the universe as limited as it is, we can draw a pretty credible case for this, being the most likely scenario of how life is seeded across the universe (and probably very similar to ours on Earth, but not a given). And even though life has not been found yet, it's only a matter of time before it is. Enceladus and Europa are possibly the most likely to have life on them now, at least in our solar system.
    Reply