NASA/Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebersold
After years of hypothesis, NASA lastly revealed on Thursday the totality of the asteroid pattern returned from Bennu to Earth final fall: 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams).
To put that quantity into perspective, the whole mass is just barely greater than one-half cup of sugar or a field of 100 paper clips. It’s about the identical mass as a small avocado, and you may’t even smear it on toast.
So, in some sense, it is a fairly small pattern. Especially when you think about the lengths to which NASA and its companions went to retrieve it. The house company’s Goddard Space Flight Center labored with the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin to construct the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft for $800 million. It launched in September 2016 on an Atlas V rocket, which price a further $183.5 million. And because it has traipsed throughout the interior Solar System and again, NASA has spent a further $200 million on mission operations.
A tin of tuna
Putting that each one collectively, NASA has invested $1.2 billion and the higher a part of a decade to retrieve a quantity of asteroid mud that might match—comfortably—inside a small can of tuna.
But, because the saying goes, good issues are available in small packages. And small although the pattern could also be, it’s 20 occasions higher than the quantity of asteroid materials beforehand returned to Earth by a pair of Japanese pattern return missions. A bit of will go a lengthy method as scientists examine the organics and different supplies on this asteroid mud to divine clues to the origin of life and circumstances that existed on the daybreak of our Solar System. You do not want handfuls of fabric to get a significant outcome from an electron microscope.
Moreover, the pattern retrieval was double the minimal requirement for the mission, 60 grams. So, OSIRIS-REx can now definitively be labeled as an unqualified success.
Biding their time
The scientific group needed to wait longer than anticipated to know the way a lot materials OSIRIS-REx introduced again to Earth. As engineers and technicians at Johnson Space Center in Houston labored to open the pattern container final October, they had been stymied by two cussed fasteners. Only after new instruments had been devised was the pattern container lastly opened to disclose the tiny treasure in January.
In the approaching weeks, some Bennu materials will probably be packaged and distributed for researchers to check. As a part of the OSIRIS-REx mission, a cohort of greater than 200 scientists around the globe will discover the regolith’s properties, together with researchers from many US establishments, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency.
NASA, nonetheless, intends to order about 70 p.c of the fabric for future examine.