Nasa Delivers A Piece Of An Ancient Asteroid To Earth

A piece of an asteroid has arrived on Earth from the other side of the solar system, in a major success for Nasa’s Osiris-Rex mission. The spacecraft has spent years flying to asteroid Bennu, gathering up a piece of it, and bringing it back home so that it can be studied by researchers. It brings an end to a mission that took seven years, involved a journey of 4 billion miles, and cost more than a billion dollars.

- ANDREW GRIFFIN

Scientists hope that studying the material can help to reveal how planets formed and evolved, and might even shed light on how life itself began. Since Bennu is around 4.5 billion years old, the sample is almost like a look back into the solar system during its early years. Nasa has referred to it as a “time capsule”. Bennu is also notable as Nasa’s “most dangerous asteroid”, according to a scale used to measure how much of a hazard a given object presents.

It is the first time that Nasa has brought back a piece of an asteroid, and the first time anyone has done so since 2020. It is also the biggest piece ever to be gathered, at around 250g. Nasa sent a team in helicopters to gather the sample from its landing site and place it in a canister, taking care to ensure that it did not become contaminated by the environment.