By james art 
Salt Lake City-After Examining Just 0.06% of A 120-Gram Material Sample from The Surface of Asteroid Bennu-Which Returned to Earth in Utah’s Rises, Publishing a Flurry of Documents on Wednesday.
“I am sure that like me, you all looked at a miracle when we saw that this beautiful capsule descends under this incredible red and white parachute in the wilderness in Utah,” NASA administrator Niki Fox said in a call for the press.
Osiris-Rex was the first mission of the United States to bring an asteroid sample, the first sample mission to return the nation after the Apollo era more than 50 years ago. The spacecraft held the record for the smallest orbit around a planetary body, only 1.227 feet above the surface, said Fox, around the height of the Empire State building.
In the last year, scientists have been studying it, the biggest asteroid sample ever gathered beyond the moon.
“These samples provide a truly unique possibility of examining the prebiotic organic chemistry that arose in the solar system before the onset of life,” says Danny Glavin, NASA’s senior scientist for sampling. His team did what he called “Beno Tea” for their experiments.
“We actually took samples. We removed them in water and acids to extract organic compounds to do this, this fluid, this tea, which we then analyzed using several different techniques for masspectrometry to identify organic molecules,” said He.
What did they find? “A truly complex soup of organic molecules,” according to Galvin, including over 10,000 organic nitrogen molecules, along with the “building elements of life.”
Scientists discover 14 of the 20 amino acids used to build proteins and all five nuclearobas, genetic components of DNA and RNA.
“These molecules were discovered before in the meteorites,” Glavin said. “But what is so important in Bennu’s findings is that these samples are virgin. They were protected from the atmospheric entrance heating from the sample return capsule. They were protected from pollution, from ground biology, while all meteorites were exposed At some level of pollution.
He added: “The bottom line is that we have more confidence that the organic material we see in these samples is extraterrestrial, not pollution. We can trust these results.”
Surprises in the dust
“I waited 20 years to tell you about this job,” says Tim McCoy, a meteorite curator at the Museum of Natural History of Smithsonian.
He said that Ben is “an asteroid of boots, relatively small, about 500 meters, but it comes from an asteroid to ancestors of rock and ice, which fell billion or two years ago-in the beginning of the history of the solar system.”
The ice melted with heat from the radioactive decay of elements, McCoy said, and the resulting water reacted with a rock to produce minerals that scientists observed in meteorites and from the 2-year orbit around Ben.
“There was a surprise,” according to McCoy, who said, “this surprise was that we had a whole set of minerals that were really rich in sodium – carbonates and phosphates and sulfates, chlorides and fluorides.”
Four and a half years ago, the ancestors’ asteroid Benno broke away from “pockets or veins of fluid, perhaps just a few feet below the surface,” McCoy said. “Within these cracks, the water was lost to the surface and these minerals were abandoned.”
A document released on Wednesday by Japanese explorer Yasuhito Sequin calls these “extremely delicate salts” from “ancient brine” that have not been observed in alien samples but can help scientists identify the “water history in the early solar system.”
Sarah Russell, a cosmic mineralogue at the London Nature Museum, said: “It was fantastic for us because it was a completely unforeseen discovery. We were not just confirmed what we thought we already knew about the asteroid, but we understood something completely new. “
These data tell a story where water, organic material and “organic important elements” could travel on asteroids such as Beno in the early solar system, encountering the earth and other planets, sowing them with “all the ingredients that are needed, To start a start life, “according to Russell.
There is no evidence of life
To be clear, there is no evidence of Ben’s life, despite many of the building blocks.
“We looked at the Bennu sample at a very fine level, something like a micro level, a million meter and less, and we do not see any cellular structures that you can expect if there are fossils there.” Do not see either structural fossils, or chemical Fossils, “Russell said.
More than 75% of the sample remains unexplored, says the Osiris-Rex project scientist Jason Djarkin. The pieces are archived at NASA Johnson’s space center, a laboratory in Japan and soon, at a Canadian Space Agency. Scientists from around the world have the opportunity to request research samples.
Another piece of Bennu will be stored at a negative 110 degree Fahrenheit for 50 years, “so maybe scientists who have not yet been born using methods that have not yet been invented can make discoveries that do not We imagined, “Dukkin said. “The gift that continues to give.”