Washington (AFP) – A small stone for man, a big discovery for humanity: In a cozy wing of a museum in Washington on Friday, cameras and phones were trained on a tiny sample of the asteroid Bennu, which should provide a better understanding of how it formed of life on earth.
Published on: April 11, 2023 – 4:45 p.m
4 mins
On display to the public for the first time on Friday at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, the small, gravel-sized fragment of the largest asteroid sample ever collected is just visible in its small capsule.
Visitors don’t fail to hold up their cell phones for a selfie next to the small black rock or to snap a photo for the family, like Jenn Mann, who traveled from neighboring Virginia to “finally” see a piece of the asteroid with her grandson the earth.
“I was afraid it would just be a speck of dust, but it’s actually much bigger than I thought,” laughs the 64-year-old computer scientist.
“I was ten years old when man first walked on the moon, and I think everyone of my generation is very attached to all of that,” she admits, before taking a photo for her little girl. “You can’t imagine how much excitement there was back then.”
The sample is part of a NASA mission to determine whether asteroids actually brought to Earth the elements that allowed life to form, such as carbon and water.
“A lot of work”
This mission, called Osiris-Rex, took this sample in 2020 from Bennu, a 500-meter-diameter asteroid that was then located more than 300 million kilometers from Earth.
© OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP
The capsule with the precious cargo successfully returned to Earth in September and landed in the American desert. Since then, analyzes have continued at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Although she worked with the scientific team on this project, Nayi Castro, like the other visitors, is seeing a fragment of the sample with her own eyes for the first time. “It’s indescribable,” she said, proudly wearing the NASA logo on her T-shirt.
“It’s great to see this sample because it took a lot of work to bring it back,” says the 36-year-old, always smiling, who is responsible for running the mission. “I can’t wait to see it with my family and friends.”
The head of NASA is also personally present on this occasion.
“We now know that this asteroid contains water crystals and carbon, two of the elements that form the origin of life,” says Bill Nelson happily, shortly before the curtain rises.
This new space adventure “is part of our quest to understand, to understand who we are, what we are, where we are, in the immensity of this cosmos,” he adds in a solemn tone to journalists and space enthusiasts eager to get out their cameras to take an image of the sample.
“A dream becomes true”
For Tim McCoy, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, this fascination among visitors and experts is normal and calls this discovery a “watershed moment.”
For him, “this is the beginning” of a long process of “trying to understand our unique planet.”
“Our planet has properties that we have not found on any other planet in the solar system or elsewhere: continents, oceans, life,” he enthuses to journalists.
“This is something I’ve dreamed of for 20 years and it’s becoming a reality today, but it’s just the first step,” he admits with emotion.
The capsule opening process is actually not yet complete. Due to the abundance of material found outside the collection mechanism itself, the main sample has not yet been opened.
The material already recovered was entrusted to a rapid analysis team to get a first idea of the composition of Bennu.
© 2023 AFP