A NASA spacecraft touched surface of the Bennu asteroid and grabbed a sample of rocks dating back to the birth of our solar system to bring home.
The minivan-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, extended its 11-foot robotic arm toward a flat patch of gravel near Bennu’s north pole and plucked the sample of rocks, the space agency’s first handful of pristine asteroid rocks. The probe will send back images of the sample collection so scientists can examine how much material was retrieved and determine whether the probe will need to make another collection attempt.
Bennu, located over 100 million miles from Earth and whose acorn-shaped body formed in the early days of our solar system, could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth. “Everything went just exactly perfect,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator from the University of Arizona, Tucson said. “We have overcome the amazing challenges that this asteroid has thrown at us, and the spacecraft appears to have operated flawlessly.”
Asteroids are among the leftover debris from the solar system’s formation some 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists believe asteroids and comets crashing into early Earth may have delivered organic compounds and water that seeded the planet for life. Atomic-level analysis of samples from Bennu could provide key evidence to support that hypothesis.
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