Everything NASA Discovered After Opening Up $1,000,000,000 Asteroid - Science

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When NASA landed a probe on an asteroid and took samples they brought back some incredibly valuable things to Earth.

The official name of this chunk of space rock is 101955 Bennu, which we'll call 'Bennu' for short because the numbers seem rather superfluous in this conversation.

Between 20 October 2020 and 10 May 2021 the OSIRIS-REx craft was on the asteroid where it had successfully collected a sample to bring back to humanity.

On 24 September 2023, seven years and 16 days after it first launched, the spacecraft made it back to Earth with a sample from the asteroid, where scientists had a bit of a job actually opening up the capsule and it wasn't fully cracked open until 14 January 2024.

According to Astronomy.com, what NASA found in their first analysis of the Bennu sample indicated that water had once flowed through the asteroid.

Subsequent research led by Sara Russell of the Natural History Museum in London found more information about this in the form of a lack of chondrules, little rounded grains of rock found in meteorites.

If you're wondering what chondrules are, they're small, microscopic rocks that are named after the Greek word for 'grain' and are thought to be part of the foundational building blocks of planets.

Bennu had been predicted to be rich in water but the discovery confirmed that, while the rocks recovered from the asteroid sample are unlike any others found before meaning that the mission to space recovered something truly unique.