On Wednesday, NASA will announce the first findings after more than two weeks of engineers painstakingly taking apart the capsule that brought samples from asteroid Bennu back to Earth after a seven-year mission. NASA has a lot to analyze because the samples from Bennu are by far the most consistent ever sent to Earth from an asteroid.

We will see what the rocks on Bennu look like, and perhaps learn something about the beginning of the “existence” of this asteroid by analyzing the composition of the rocks brought.

The capsule, which arrived on Earth on September 24, has several containers that had to be carefully opened so that the material brought from hundreds of millions of kilometers away would not be contaminated.

NASA said that they received a “treasure” by successfully delivering these samples to Earth, and will analyze them slowly, in complete safety, so as not to lose anything.

Bennu has remained unchanged for billions of years and is so old that calculations suggest it formed in the first ten million years of our solar system’s 4.5 billion-year history.

NASA was also asked if it would be possible to find life forms and the answer was a resounding NO, as nothing would survive on Bennu.

The researchers expect Bennu to be rich in carbon and contain water molecules trapped in minerals. “The main goal for me (…) is to try to understand whether these carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu brought compounds that could have led to the birth of life on our planet,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of Osiris. Rex’s mission.

Asteroid Bennu has a diameter of almost half a kilometer. “Asteroids are a kind of time capsules that float in space and can give us samples since the birth of the solar system,” said Laurie Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Sciences Division.

The asteroid Bennu was named in 2013 by a nine-year-old child from the American state of North Carolina who won the “Name this asteroid!” contest. Bennu was the ancient Egyptian god of the sun, creation and rebirth.

The asteroid was discovered in 1999, and the name Bennu is much friendlier than “1999 RQ36,” as the asteroid was called until then.

During the mission, the asteroid already surprised NASA employees: during the collection of samples, its surface turned out to be less dense than they expected.

The Osiris Rex mission was launched seven years ago. More specifically, the Osiris-Rex probe was launched in September 2016, arrived at asteroid Bennu two years later and mapped it for a year, and NASA staff then picked the spot where the probe touched the surface in an attempt to take soil samples. . On October 20, 2020, samples were successfully collected.

This is the first time that the Americans brought back samples from an asteroid, so far only the Japanese managed to do it, in two missions, in 2010 and 2020. The big difference is that the number is several tens of times higher than the Mission returned to Earth the Japanese Hayabusa2 in 2020. It was estimated that there were 250 grams of stones, compared to the 5 grams that the Japanese brought from Ryugu.

For researchers, these samples are very valuable because we are talking about material that is more than 4.5 billion years old, and asteroids have changed very little, so they tell us a lot about the “bricks” of matter from which planets are formed.

Asteroid Bennu may hit Earth on an autumn day in 2182, the probability of this is 1 in 2700 or 0.037%. This is a possibility, but a very small one, as NASA officials noted when they announced the possibility of an impact.