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.
