NASA grabbed a whopping 120 grams of rubble from asteroid Bennu, and it may contain the seeds of life
NASA scientists have finally tallied how much material a spacecraftsnatched from a distant "potentially hazardous" asteroid , and it turns out they've got more than double what they expected. The sample — roughly 4.3 ounces (122 grams) of rocky space rubble that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected from the asteroid Bennu — could contain some of the earliest precursors for life and is the first space rock ever retrieved by a NASA mission. After landing in the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023, the OSIRIS-REx capsule was taken to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where scientists began working to disassemble it — which proved trickier than many anticipated. Two of the capsule's 35 fasteners got stuck , forcing NASA researchers to initially only collect about 2.48 ounces (70.3 grams) of sample resting on the lid of the canister. Related: Asteroid Bennu may be 'a fragment of an ancient ocean world', 1st sample analysis suggests Then, after speciall...
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