NASA published the first photo of samples of asteroid Bennu from the OSIRIS-REx main repository

Last week, the space agency finally opened the capsule with samples of the Bennu asteroid, which was delivered by OSIRIS-REx, after struggling for months to deal with a faulty lid fastening.

The Bennu asteroid is a near-Earth asteroid of class "B" (a rare class of carbon asteroids, the surface of which may contain, among other things, organic polymers) aged at around 4.5 billion years. Its soil could provide scientists with important information about the emergence of life on Earth and the early days of the Solar System.

The mission to collect samples of the asteroid called OSIRIS-REx was launched back in 2016, and after two years the spacecraft, covering 6.2 billion kilometers, finally reached the asteroid and collected regolith, beginning its long journey home.

Images of Bennu taken by OSIRIS-REx while in the asteroid's orbit

In September 2023, the mission "landed" the capsule with samples in the desert of the Pentagon proving ground in Utah.

Capsule with Bennu samples after landing

Preliminary analysis of the samples located outside the main capsule showed the presence of water and carbon compounds. The main sample will be divided among scientific teams and world space agencies: NASA will keep 70% of the sample, while the remaining 25% will be distributed to 200 researchers from 35 different institutions. 4% will go to the Canadian Space Agency, and another 0.5% to the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Initially, scientists hoped to collect at least 60 grams of regolith from the asteroid, but at least 70 grams of "additional" material accumulated on the OSIRIS-REx equipment. Meanwhile, access to the main capsule was complicated by two faulty fasteners; last week, engineers finally opened it — below is the first full image of the samples (the full-size version can be viewed on the NASA website):

The $1 billion OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is NASA's first mission to collect and deliver asteroid samples to Earth, although Japan has already achieved two similar missions (in 2010 the Hayabusa 1 mission retrieved materials from the Itokawa asteroid, and in 2020 Hayabusa 2 brought back samples from the Ryugu asteroid). Next, OSIRIS-REx will visit Apophis — another near-Earth asteroid that was once considered a serious threat to Earth (the latest measurements show that it will fly past our planet in 2029, within one-tenth of the distance to the Moon).