The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has collected samples from Bennu — a 4.5 billion-year-old “near-Earth” asteroid that has a slight chance of a planetary collision 159 years from now — and they could show, as the agency described it, “the building blocks of life on Earth.”
This discovery could rock our world.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has collected samples from Bennu — a 4.5 billion-year-old “near-Earth” asteroid that has a slight chance of a planetary collision 159 years from now — and they could show, as the agency described it, “the building blocks of life on Earth.”
NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer spacecraft, or OSIRIS-REx for short, retrieved parts of Bennu seen to contain both “abundant” carbon content and water.
The discovery opens a door to the possibility that our planet’s habitable capabilities — unique to the rest of the solar system — stem from portions of the rock.
The samples were safely parachuted down to the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range at the end of last month — part of a first-of-its-kind mission that started in 2016 — for analysis.
