Spacemud from asteroid Bennu offers glimpse into celestial previous – National

New analysis on a pattern collected from the asteroid Bennu — a small portion of which ought to arrive in Canada quickly — is providing a glimpse into the way it got here to be.

Studies printed in Nature Astronomy and Nature Geoscience final week supply some perception into the granules that had been collected and dropped at Earth in September 2023 as a part of NASA-led OSIRIS-REx mission.

The three research, which embrace Canadian students, discovered that Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid, however its composition suggests the mum or dad asteroid it break up from accommodates supplies from all through the photo voltaic system.

“What they’ve done is they’ve looked at the origin and the formation and evolution of the Bennu sample to understand its history,” stated Dr. Patrick Hill, program scientist on the Canadian Space Agency.

The new analysis comes as Canada is getting ready to obtain its personal portion for scientific analysis. Due to its contribution to the mission to retrieve the pattern, the Canadian Space Agency will get a minimize of the celestial bounty, however no sooner than 2026.

“The CSA is building its capacity to curate its first sample collected in space,” Hill stated. Construction of a clear room south of Montreal started in January 2025. The pattern would arrive in a fastidiously co-ordinated switch with NASA, Hill stated.

When it does, it will make Canada the fifth nation on the planet to curate samples which have been collected in house.

Canada’s will host about 4 per cent of the entire 122 grams of mud and pebbles — slightly below 5 grams.

“This area is quite niche because of the astral materials and there’s a lot of requirements that we have to make sure are implemented to ensure that we are not contaminating the sample,” Hill stated, which implies defending it from water, natural molecules or plastics.

“The goal of these missions is not to modify the material while it’s here on Earth,” Hill stated.

The NASA-led mission launched OSIRIS-REx into house in 2016 to gather from the floor of an asteroid materials that scientists hope will supply them perception into the formation of the photo voltaic system.

The spacecraft started orbiting the asteroid — known as Bennu — in 2018 and grabbed a pattern in 2020.

It started a return to Earth in 2021, and a capsule with the rocks and house mud landed within the Utah desert lastly arriving in September 2023.

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Canada’s contribution to the mission was a laster altimeter instrument, often known as OLA, which measures altitude and distance. As a outcome, Bennu was closely surveyed, with billions of measurements of the asteroid over two years.

The instrument helped pinpoint the perfect place to get a pattern, with the craft touchdown briefly to gather the fabric.

The most up-to-date research discovered that Bennu was shaped from a bigger mum or dad asteroid destroyed by a collision within the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That mum or dad asteroid shaped within the outer photo voltaic system with materials from a wide range of places together with past our personal photo voltaic system.

It was shaped from mud from our photo voltaic system and natural matter from interstellar house. The evaluation of the pattern to date have proven the presence of stardust grains which have compositions that predate the photo voltaic system, Hill stated.

“We have a lot of meteorites that provide a lot of information about this sort of area of research, but these missions are great because you go and get the sample and you bring it back,” Hill stated.

“So it’s not altered by travelling through the atmosphere and modification on the Earth’s surface, so it allows us to really look at the pristine material in detail.”

Another research discovered that the asteroid was dramatically reworked over time by interactions with water and publicity to the cruel house surroundings.

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