A seven-year mission to collect pieces of an ancient asteroid ended on Sunday when a capsule carrying rock fragments touched down in a Utah desert.
A Purdue University scientist will be part of the team analyzing pieces of the celestial rock.
NASA’s goal was to acquire roughly 60 grams of rock from the asteroid Bennu. Those fragments hold evidence of our solar system's early days, when planets were being formed.
The asteroid’s estimated age is roughly 4.5 billion years old. It has been essentially untouched since the beginning of the solar system.
Michelle Thompson is a planetary scientist at Purdue and part of the sample analysis team for the mission. She said unlike meteorite fragments that fall to Earth, pieces of Bennu are uncontaminated by our planet.
“Bennu hasn’t really changed over the history of the solar system,” she said. “So what we’re looking for is this inventory of building blocks of organic molecules that might have been delivered to Earth and evolved into life on Earth.”
Another key question that Bennu could help answer: how water made it to an early Earth.
Thompson said the final thing that makes Bennu so compelling to scientists is that it may one day collide with our planet.
“There’s a chance that a couple hundred years from now it could be on a collision course with Earth,” she said. “We want to study this asteroid in the greatest detail we can to understand what the probability of that might be.”
Thompson said being on the analysis team is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and the pinnacle of her career.
Thompson and the analysis team are expected to begin their work on the asteroid Tuesday evening.
NASA is expected to hold a press conference on Oct. 11 to report its initial findings on Bennu.
