In a discreet vacuumed-packed container inside a FedEx box lies a piece of ancient history; extremely ancient history.
In a discreet vacuumed-packed container inside a FedEx box lies a piece of ancient history; extremely ancient history.
The material, at just 120 milligrams, will provide information about the early solar system, planetary formation, and potentially, even life on Earth.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have recently received and will analyze samples from the asteroid Bennu that will help explain how it formed and from where it came.
Bennu is a small, carbon-rich near-Earth asteroid that passes close to Earth about every six years. It was the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to collect an asteroid sample and bring it to Earth. The spacecraft returned to Earth last fall, landing in Utah, with approximately 120 grams of Bennu tucked away on board.
„We’re going to look at the composition of different elements to figure out where exactly this asteroid might have formed in the first place“, said LLNL scientist Jan Render, one of the team members who opened the box from NASA.
An ancient relic of our solar system’s early days, Bennu, at about one-third of a mile wide at its equator, has seen more than 4.5 billion years of history. Scientists think that within 10 million years of our solar system’s formation, Bennu’s present-day composition was already established.
Preliminary data by the LLNL team and others indicate that this larger asteroid likely formed in the outer solar system beyond Jupiter. Orbital research has shown that Bennu likely broke off from a much larger carbon-rich asteroid about 700 million to 2 billion years ago, probably spent some time in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and has drifted much closer to Earth since then.
