What are the stones on Bennu? On Wednesday, NASA is showing samples taken from the asteroid during the seven-year Osiris Rex mission. We are also expected to learn details about the rock composition and history of the distant asteroid from which NASA managed to obtain unexpectedly consistent samples. The NASA conference runs from 6 p.m.

The Osiris Rex mission cost $1.2 billion and was approved in 2011. Its preparation, like the mission itself, lasted six years.

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, from the asteroid Bennu, would not be contaminated.

The “unpacking” took longer because there were more rock and stone samples in total than NASA originally thought. “It was the best problem we could have,” NASA said of the more rocky material in the capsule.

An in-depth analysis was conducted at NASA’s Johnston Space Center in Houston. Immediately after arriving on Earth, the capsule with the sample stayed for a short time in a sterile room at a military base in Utah.

Only a small fraction of the total samples will be tested in the US or sent to research laboratories in other parts of the world. The “bulk” of samples will be preserved for analysis by future generations when even more powerful analyzers become available.

Bennu is thought to have taken its current form after an asteroid belt collision one to two billion years ago.

Studying asteroids can allow scientists to better understand the formation of the Solar System and how Earth became habitable. Some researchers believe that asteroids like Bennu may have brought compounds to Earth that later made life possible.

NASA is expected to announce a number of physical characteristics, such as the density, color and shape of the material – and whether we are talking about rocks, pebbles, fine grains or dust.

Samples returned in 2020 by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission from asteroid Ryugu were found to contain two organic compounds, supporting the hypothesis that celestial objects such as comets, asteroids and meteorites that “bombarded” the early Earth also could bring the original ingredients. then life

Bennu, a very old celestial object

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. It is a valuable celestial body because its mineralogical and chemical composition is estimated to have remained unchanged since its inception.

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.

Bennu is a rubble asteroid, an asteroid that is NOT a monolith, but is made up of many small pieces of rock held together by only weak gravity.

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, the samples were successfully collected and the probe began its long journey to Earth in 2021.

This is the first time that the Americans brought back samples from an asteroid, so far only the Japanese managed to do so, in two missions, in 2010 and 2020. The big difference is that the number is several tens of times greater than the Mission brought to Earth by the Japanese Hayabusa2 in 2020.