#78 What is OSIRIS-REx?

And what can asteroid dust tell us about life across the universe?

Author

Dr. Dan Smith
June 28, 2024

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Your faithful writer,
Dr. Daniel Smith

Earlier this week, NASA announced that it had found “carbon, nitrogen, and organic compounds” that “make up life as we know it” in the dust of the Bennu asteroid.

The research team that analyzed the asteroid dust said that the presence of these compounds provides “hints that the asteroid could have splintered off from a long-gone, tiny, primitive ocean world.”

While it’s highly unlikely that this origin planet was home to life, these new findings can help us to better understand the chemical conditions that enable the emergence of life on Earth and around the universe.

But you might be asking yourself: how did we get this asteroid dust?

Let me introduce you to the subject of today’s newsletter: NASA’s unmanned asteroid spacecraft, the OSIRIS-ReX.

OSIRIS-REx is an unmanned spacecraft that traveled over 4 billion miles during its 7.75-year journey from Earth to Bennu and back between 2016 and 2023.

A photo OSRIS-REx took while landing on the Bennu asteroid

OSIRIS arrived at Bennu in 2018, but spent two years floating around the asteroid and analyzing it from afar.

It landed on the asteroid on October 20, 2020 and departed on September 24, 2023.

During its time on Bennu, NASA officials were able to use the spacecraft’s lander to map out much of the asteroid. (see map below)

OSIRIS was the first American spacecraft to return asteroid samples to Earth, but a Japanese spacecraft had previously made successful asteroid journeys in 2010 and 2018.

What’s next for OSIRIS?

The spacecraft has already been repurposed (and renamed) for a new mission: visiting the asteroid Apophis when it comes near the Earth in 2029.

The newly-named OSIRIS APEX will ride again, and we can hope that they will bring more asteroid dust for scientists to analyze. 🫡

Researchers should be able to keep themselves busy with the Bennu dust in the meantime.

According to NASA:

Dozens more labs in the United States and around the world will receive portions of the Bennu sample from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston in the coming months, and many more scientific papers describing analyses of the Bennu sample are expected in the next few years from the OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Team.

OSIRIS-REx seems to have been a great success, with lead researcher Dante Lauretta saying that the mission has produced “the largest reservoir of unaltered asteroid material on Earth Right now.”

His colleague Harold Connolly was more poetic:

“The Bennu samples are tantalizingly beautiful extraterrestrial rocks…

Each week, analysis by the OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Team provides new and sometimes surprising findings that are helping place important constraints on the origin and evolution of Earth-like planets.”

ART OF THE DAY

Statue of Dancers and Musicians, c.300 BC–AD 300. Colima State, Mexico.

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Yours,
Dan