Secrets of the Asteroid Bennu Samples

Narration: Ryan Fitzgibbons

Transcript:

What do this California lakebed, and this rock on an asteroid have in common? Although they’re located on radically different worlds, they formed in environments that may have assembled the building blocks of life.

For over a year, NASA scientists have been studying the material gathered by the OSIRIS- REx mission from the asteroid Bennu, and one of the many things they’ve found are tiny crystals of a mineral called trona.

Trona is a mineral deposit known as an evaporite, meaning it forms when a briny lake evaporates, leaving behind all kinds of salts, just like in the salt beds of Searles Lake, California.

By finding trona and other evaporites tells scientists that the Bennu samples once held pockets of salty, room-temperature water.

And that is just the kind of environment perfect for forming organic molecules, the building blocks of life.

Scientists found organic molecules in the Bennu samples, including compounds that are important to building life.

These findings and others gathered from the asteroid samples suggest that Bennu is a fragment from a once wet world, likely including material from beyond Saturn’s orbit, that existed about 4.5 billion years ago. Finding these ingredients supports the theory that asteroids like Bennu dispersed water and the chemical building blocks of life throughout our solar system and beyond.