NASA will reveal on Wednesday what OSIRIS-REx brought back from asteroid Bennu


NASA will give the public a look at an asteroid sample brought back to Earth by its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft next week. The reveal is scheduled for Wednesday, October 11 at 11am ET. The capsule containing rocks and dust taken from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid “Bennu” landed at a Department of Defense training site in the Utah desert on September 15. 24, and scientists have been working on conducting their preliminary analysis since then.

OSIRIS-REx returned in 2020 and spent a year and a half observing the asteroid from above, before heading back toward Earth in May 2021. After its fall last month, the canister was brought to Houston, Texas to be opened at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. OSIRIS-REx, on the other hand, is still in space, now headed towards an asteroid called Apophis under a new mission name OSIRIS-APEX.

Asteroid Bennu is estimated to be more than 4.5 billion years old, meaning its material may hold clues about the formation of the Solar System and how the building blocks of life came to Earth. And, to the scientists’ delight, the mission managed to capture more material than anyone expected. “The best ‘problem’ is that there is so much material that it is taking longer than we expected to collect,” said NASA’s deputy OSIRIS-REx curation lead. With the livestream coming, we’ll soon know more about what they’ve found in that content so far.




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