Hitting an asteroid teaching space at university in the United States

It's a moment Lucas Smith won't forget: the day he realized how lucky he was to be able to study space objects at the planetary laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson He was examining a sample of a meteorite, a piece of an asteroid that fell to Earth, the doctoral student told ShareAmerica when a professor came in and announced: I have a big box here with lunar rocks. After keeping them for 50 years, NASA handed over samples from its Apollo missions – the first to take men to the Moon – to universities for research purposes.

Today, like Lucas Smith, researchers are receiving other samples whose study could reshuffle the cards in our understanding of the solar system On September 24, the NASA probe OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) brought back to Earth a sample of the asteroid Bennu. The robotic arm of a NASA spacecraft took the sample in October 2020, when the asteroid was 321 million kilometers from Earth.

Thanks to the fragments collected, researchers could not only learn more about this 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid but also unravel certain mysteries about the origins of our planet, underlines Anjani Polit, a systems engineer responsible for implementing it. work of the OSIRIS-REx mission Asteroids like Bennu are time capsules containing the beginnings of the solar system, she told ShareAmerica. Bennu could have brought water and other molecules to Earth, precursors of life. This asteroid sample has a lot to teach us.

NASA Support for Higher Education

NASA has distributed dust samples from outside the capsule that brought Bennu's samples back to Earth, but that's just the start. American higher education institutions that have received them include Boston College, Brown University, California Institute of Technology, Purdue, Rowan University, and the University of Virginia NASA will also send fragments to museums and partners in Canada and Japan. Much of the asteroid sample will be preserved for future generations.

NASA's action is in line with its long-standing support for research. Each year, the space agency distributes 400 lunar samples * to universities in the United States and abroad. Harold Connolly Jr, a professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Rowan University in New Jersey, believes that sharing with researchers from diverse backgrounds is essential to advancing science.

Glimpse into the distant past

Lucas Smith explains that meteorites and asteroids contain presolar grains that can give scientists clues about the formation of stars, like our sun. Unlike meteorites which can be contaminated when they fall to Earth, the Bennu samples were recovered from space, meaning they could provide specimens of intact presolar grains, he adds He has already studied the exterior of the OSIRIS-REx capsule and believes that additional samples arriving in the coming months will provide even greater research opportunities What fascinates me [in these fragments], marvels Lucas Smith, is that they form a sort of skein that brings everything together. They go back further in time than if we directly studied a planet itself.