According to the Daily Mail newspaper, the asteroid samples brought by the spacecraft called Osiris-Rex, which returned to Earth, began to be investigated by scientists.
In the news, it was noted that NASA had to stop the research after detecting unidentified black dust in the interior of the capsule containing the samples from Bennu.
It is stated that the dust will be analyzed to determine whether it is a substance coming from the asteroid, and the research is expected to continue after the analysis.
It is stated that the samples will help scientists better understand how the Earth and life formed.
Osiris-Rex left its sample capsule from a distance of 100 thousand kilometers on September 24, and the capsule landed in the Utah Desert by parachute 4 hours later.
The samples were taken to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for analysis.
BENNU ASTEROID
Bennu, which orbits the Sun 81 million kilometers from Earth and is the size of the Empire State Building, is believed to be the broken piece of a much larger asteroid.
Bennu is expected to come dangerously close to Earth in 2182.
Dante Lauretta from the University of Arizona, who leads the Bennu asteroid study, said that they think the data collected by Osiris-Rex will help the effort to deflect the asteroid.
Osiris-Rex, which was sent into space from NASA’s Cape Canaveral Space Center in Florida in 2016 and reached the Bennu asteroid in 2018, will travel 178 million miles (about 286 meters) in 2021 after collecting debris from Bennu’s carbon-rich dark surface. He had set out to return to Earth from a distance of one million kilometers. (Source: AA / Photos: Reuters)