Photo courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center via Flickr.
New images from NASA offer a first look at the fragments from the asteroid Bennu, which scientists say could offer new insight on the origins of life.
By Sarah Grinnell ’26
S&E Editor
Another new piece of the final frontier is now within humanity’s grasp.
On Wednesday, Oct. 11, NASA revealed images of its first-ever asteroid sample returned to Earth, The New York Times reported. The fragments were collected from the seven-year-long OSIRIS-REx mission launched in 2016. The goal of the mission was to collect materials from the 4.5 billion-year-old near-Earth asteroid Bennu, according to CNN.
According to the OSIRIS-REx mission description on the NASA website, the newly retrieved sample was collected in 2020, but the fragments finally landed in the Utah desert on Sept. 24 after being dropped off by a spacecraft. From there, they were delivered to their permanent residence at NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. On Wednesday, Oct. 11, a first look at the fragments was finally revealed to the public.
The unveiled images speak to the possibility of new insight into the origins of life, according to the OSIRIS-Rex mission description on the NASA website. The website mentions that scientists have hopes the samples will “offer clues to whether asteroids colliding with Earth billions of years ago brought water and other key ingredients for life.”
Professor Thomas Burbine, director of the John Payson Williston Observatory at Mount Holyoke College, though currently unaffiliated with the mission, has a small personal connection to the project, having worked on it many years ago for a former graduate school advisor.
“Asteroids are “remaining material that didn’t form the planets,” and they are most commonly found between Mars and Jupiter,” Burbine said.
According to Burbine, the asteroid “Bennu” appears to possess similar properties to carbonaceous chondrites, which he describes as “material that condensed pretty much out of the solar nebula.” This is the mass of dust and gas from which the solar system originated.
What Burbine says makes this particular sample so exciting is how “pristine” it is.
“You're looking at material as original as possible as it is on the surface of the asteroid,” he explained, emphasizing that this material is what astronomers consider to be the “most unaltered” type.
In a CNN article, Dr. Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, states that the Bennu sample is about 5% carbon, which makes it “the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever returned to Earth.”
Burbine explained that samples containing that much carbon typically have “elemental compositions very similar to the sun.” He said this makes them ideal for study since “you want something that hasn’t really been processed [and] that is as similar as possible to the composition of the solar nebula.”
According to Burbine, the rich carbon contents of the sample indicate that asteroids like Bennu contain “the building blocks of the planets.” Therefore, they could be revelatory in providing new knowledge about “the start of life and also the start of the solar system.”
“Asteroids like that also contain a lot of organic material, a lot of water and hydrated silicates, lots of carbon — all the elements you need for life,” he said. “So they think these asteroids, when the earth had formed … were striking the earth and giving the ingredients for life.”
Burbine also cleared up a popular misconception circulated by various news outlets. Namely, that this is the first time an asteroid sample has been returned to Earth. According to Burbine, Japan returned two samples prior to OSIRIS-REx. However, Burbine says what makes this particular return so “groundbreaking” is that it was the United States’ first return of an asteroid sample. It was also the first mission to return a sample of its size, which he estimated was “half a pound.”
“To get this much sample by going to an asteroid is . . . an amazing achievement,” he stated, even joking that the mission almost “worked too well” as the sheer size of the sample means the research process is going to be slower. Despite this, Burbine assured that “[NASA will] have huge discoveries.” These will likely be announced in December at the American Geophysical Union.
The physical retrieval of an asteroid sample often has significant implications for the study of asteroids. Normally, astronomers like Burbine study asteroids using a telescope, measuring them based on how light from the sun interacts with their surfaces. Since different minerals absorb and reflect light differently, scientists can use this to evaluate the asteroid’s composition, Burbine explained.
With a physical sample like the one from Bennu, “You'll know exactly what is in the asteroid,” he said. “And that allows you to better understand how well we can determine the composition of an asteroid just by reflecting light.”
Furthermore, the material of these samples is extremely fragile. According to Burbine, if you were to put it in your hand, you could easily crush it. It typically would not be strong enough to get through the Earth’s atmosphere. Thus, he explained that this kind of material “is very rare on Earth” due to its fragile nature, making the success of this mission even more special.
The abundance of asteroid missions currently planned or already underway has led Burbine to believe we are living in a “golden age of asteroid research.”
“There's lots of money, people are doing work on very different things. Everybody is studying lots and lots of asteroids. So it's just amazing what's going on now, that there is all this stuff in the last year,” he said.
And the possibilities have only just begun. According to Burbine, the sample will be stored, studied and distributed for scientists across the globe to examine. “They're going to keep the samples for the next generation, next two generations, so people can submit a request for samples. So this will be an ongoing project . . . it just doesn't end,” he said.
Burbine hopes that this mission will “generate interest in asteroids and meteorites on campus'' such that, in the future, Mount Holyoke students may one day even be among the future generations to study the samples. In fact, Burbine said one former Mount Holyoke student, Laura Breitenfeld ‘17, is even currently involved with the mission as a researcher.
The study of asteroids also has far deeper implications than merely marveling at the wonders of the cosmos. Burbine stressed it could even be life-saving.
“[Scientists believe that] the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was only 10 kilometers in diameter,” he explained. Scientists want to know as much as possible about these objects because such catastrophes could be prevented “if you have enough time and you know what you're doing.”
While natural disasters are tricky to predict and respond to, “an asteroid impact is something . . . you could prevent if you know enough about the asteroid," Burbine stated.
These findings mean that we can do more than just revel in the feat of bringing a fragment of outer space back to Earth. Burbine suggests that “the small [amount of] money we're spending to learn about these objects could save our lives sooner or later,” making the success of this mission and future retrievals even more important.