A group of Canadian scientists is awaiting delivery of an outer space postcard from the past.
On Sept. 24, seven years after it blasted off from its Florida launch pad, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is expected to drop a capsule into the Earth’s atmosphere containing matter plucked from the surface of an asteroid dating from the early history of the solar system.“I’ve never worked with extraterrestrial material,” said Dominique Weis, a geoscientist at the University of British Columbia, who’s in line to get a tiny sample.
“The Earth was formed by asteroids getting together,” he said. “Studying asteroids helps you understand the origins of our planet.”As well, Bennu is from an area of space that cooled off well before the central part of what became the solar system, “freezing” those materials before they were altered by heat. And grabbing samples directly from the asteroid’s surface means scientists don’t have to account for the effects that flying through Earth’s atmosphere has on meteorites.
Some scientists think those compounds could offer clues to how life began on Earth — although Hildebrand points out planets such as Mars and Venus are also showered with such material and don’t appear to host life.
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