Pieces of the asteroid Bennu, collected by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, are being studied at Brown as part of an effort to better understand the solar system's early history and the origins of materials necessary for life on Earth.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - As part of a large-scale effort to unlock clues about the origins of life on Earth, Brown University researchers are analyzing rare fragments from the asteroid Bennu, hoping to reveal its ancient secrets.
The work is happening at the NASA-funded Reflectance Experiment Laboratory (RELAB), which is housed on the University's campus and led by Brown planetary scientist Ralph Milliken.
The researchers at RELAB are among approximately 200 scientists around the world to have received samples from Bennu to date. The analysis is part of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which was the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid and deliver it to Earth.
"These samples are the best examples we have today of some of the most primitive material in our solar system," said Milliken, who also directs the NASA Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium and is an associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown. "It's really amazing and humbling to know our group is one of a handful of specialized spectroscopy labs who are working with this material that has been in space for the last four and a half billion years."
NASA's robotic OSIRIS-REx spacecraft launched in 2016 and returned in September 2023, delivering a container filled with about four ounces of rock and dust from Bennu, which it collected on Oct. 20, 2020. Samples of Bennu started to arrive at Brown in November 2023 for initial analysis due to the lab and University's long history of working with sensitive extraterrestrial samples.
RELAB has since received and analyzed additional Bennu samples for a detailed look at the material and to better understand its ingredients.
"Understanding these kinds of asteroids will provide really powerful insights into fundamental questions of where the water on Earth might have come from, what sorts of organic compounds may have been delivered here and what kinds of minerals are associated with those components," Milliken said. "It will also add to our knowledge of the variety of material that formed in the earliest days of our solar system and that are still out there floating about, continuing to be delivered to rocky and icy planets and moons. This is an important piece of the puzzle in understanding how we might go from the raw ingredients necessary for life to somehow ending up with the great diversity and complexity of life that we have today on our planet."
