All articles tagged with #space dust
Dante Lauretta, the planetary scientist who led the OSIRIS-REx mission to retrieve space dust from asteroid Bennu, discusses the mission's impact and his activities post-sample retrieval. He describes the challenges faced during the disassembly of the asteroid sample collector and the significance of studying the material for astrobiology and the origins of life.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is set to return to Earth with the largest-ever sample extracted from the asteroid Bennu. After a seven-year journey, the spacecraft will land in Utah's West Desert, where scientists will study the 4.5-billion-year-old space dust to learn more about the asteroid's composition and potential for delivering life-forming compounds to Earth. The sample is not expected to contain contaminants and will be retrieved by scientists for analysis. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will be repurposed to study another near-Earth asteroid, Apophis, in 2029.
Astrobiologist Tomonori Totani proposes studying space dust as a way to search for signs of life beyond Earth. Space dust could be carrying evidence of life from other planets that was blasted away by asteroid strikes. Totani suggests that grains of space dust approximately 1 micrometer in size could carry biosignatures and travel fast enough to reach distant planets like Earth. He estimates that around 100,000 such grains land on Earth every year and could be analyzed for traces of life that originated on other worlds.