The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will soon return to Earth. What's on board could reveal the extraterrestrial origins of life on Earth.
On Sept. 24, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will come hurtling back through Earth's atmosphere after a years-long journey to Bennu, a"potentially hazardous asteroid" with a 1 in 2700 chance of smashing cataclysmically into Earth, the highest odds of any identified space object.
Related: Key building block for life discovered on distant asteroid Ryugu — and it could explain how life on Earth began Yet draw closer, as OSIRIS-REx did on its first approach in 2018, and an altogether stranger picture emerges. Veins of carbonate rock 3 feet long criss-cross a surface spattered with carbon-rich organic material — evidence that Bennu's parent body, a 60-mile wide object which formed during the earliest years of the solar system and split roughly one billion years ago to form the asteroid, was once home to torrents of hot water and the earliest building blocks of life.
But when OSIRIS-REx finally arrived, it encountered a craggy asteroid strewn with sharp boulders that rendered the original landing strategy, which depended on a height-measuring laser altimeter, completely useless. Instead, the team nudged the spacecraft into a tight orbit using Bennu's feeble gravity — making thousands of passes over the rock's surface to search for a safe landing spot.
"We're looking at flat images and thinking: 'Well, that might be okay, that looks reasonably safe and flat,' and then all of a sudden it pops out in 3D we're like: 'Err, no,'" Lauretta said. Besides offering the spacecraft a precarious foothold on Bennu's surface, TAGSAM sent dust and broken rock flying in all directions, most importantly into OSIRIS-REx's sample chamber, which collected so much more of the material than expected that it briefly had trouble closing.
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