Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist.
An Earth-threatening asteroid may be the last thing you want to see — unless it's in the confines of a museum. Today , the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History revealed the first public display of a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu, which NASA deems a"potentially dangerous object."
NASA scientists first revealed the sample on Oct. 11 after it hurtled back to Earth aboard the OSIRIS-REx capsule at speeds of up to 27,000 mph . After a seven-year, 4 billion-mile round trip, the capsule deployed its parachute and safely landed in the Utah desert before being transported to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where scientists began analyzing its contents for signs of life beyond our planet.
"This is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever returned to Earth," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a news conference upon the sample's return."Carbon and water molecules are exactly the elements we wanted to find. They're crucial elements in the formation of our own planet, and they're going to help us determine the origins of elements that could have led to life.
Some of these building blocks — including uracil, one of the nucleobases for RNA — were recently found on the asteroid Ryugu by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft, which returned to Earth with its rock sample in 2020. OSIRIS-REx mission scientists are hoping to find other potential precursors for Earth's biology inside the Bennu sample.
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