NASA Unveils First Glimpse of Space Rock Collected From Asteroid

The jackpot from a seven-year mission to bring back bits of an asteroid was unveiled on Wednesday. From a report: NASA officials in Houston displayed images of salt-and-pepper chunks of rock and particles of dark space dust that were brought back to Earth from the asteroid, Bennu, and described initial scientific observations about the material. The mission, Osiris-Rex, concluded in September when a capsule full of asteroid was jettisoned through Earth's atmosphere and recovered in the Utah desert. The first pieces of materials that leaked outside the container were analyzed using a variety of laboratory techniques, revealing just the earliest findings. Scientists found water molecules trapped in clay minerals -- water from asteroids similar to Bennu could have filled Earth's oceans. "The reason that Earth is a habitable world, that we have oceans and lakes and rivers and rain, is because these clay minerals, like minerals, like the ones we're seeing from Bennu, landed on Earth four billion years ago," Dante Lauretta, the mission's principal investigator, said during a NASA event on Wednesday. The materials also contained sulfur, key for many geological transformations in rocks. "It determines how quickly things melt and it is also critical for biology," said Dr. Lauretta, who displayed microscopic images and 3-D visualizations of the material. The scientists also found magnetite, an iron oxide mineral that can play an important role as a catalyst in organic chemical reactions. "We're looking at the kinds of minerals that may have played a central role in the origin of life on Earth," Dr. Lauretta said. The samples are also chock-full of carbon, the element that is the building block for life.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.