The general public will get its first direct take a look at a fraction of the asteroid Bennu next week when the Smithsonian debuts its display of the NASA-returned space rock sample.
The Washington, D.C. institution has announced that its National Museum of Natural History will unveil the rare carbon-rich rock to its visitors on Friday, Nov. 3. The Bennu sample can be exhibited within the museum’s meteorite gallery, which is a component of the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems and Minerals.
“With the assistance of our partners at NASA, we’re proud to place one in every of these momentous samples on display to the general public for the primary time,” said Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History, in an announcement.
Other samples will follow on display on the University of Arizona’s Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum in Tucson and at Space Center Houston, situated adjoining to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, where a lot of the Bennu samples reside for scientific study. Opening dates for those exhibits are still to be announced, though could also be as soon as Nov. 15 based on one in every of the venues.
Related: NASA’s 1st asteroid sample is wealthy in carbon and water, OSIRIS-REx team finds
The Smithsonian’s display comes just 40 days after NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft safely landed its sample return capsule on the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. The Sept. 24 touchdown marked the completion of a seven-year round trip to Bennu and NASA’s first asteroid sample mission (Japan previously collected samples from two asteroids in 2010 and 2020, respectively).
Along with its sample for display, the Smithsonian also received one other piece of the asteroid for study. Bennu’s rocks are thought thus far to the formation of the solar system greater than 4.5 billion years ago. Early telescope observations of Bennu suggested that, unlike most asteroids, it’s carbon-rich and certain incorporates organic molecules similar to people who sparked life on an embryonic Earth.
NASA scientists working inside a specially built laboratory on the Johnson Space Center have already found evidence of essential elements like carbon within the tiny rocks that were deposited outside of the essential sample container, which holds a trove of larger fragments. These early samples, that are smaller than a grain of rice, also contain water-rich minerals. Researchers speculate that similar water-containing asteroids bombarded Earth billions of years ago, providing the water that eventually formed the planet’s first oceans.
“Having now returned to Earth without being exposed to our water-rich atmosphere or the life that fills every corner of our planet, the samples of Bennu hold the promise to inform us in regards to the water and organics before life got here to form our unique planet,” said Tim McCoy, the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of meteorites. McCoy has worked on the OSIRIS-REx mission for nearly twenty years as a part of a world team of scientists.
The samples being placed on public display are still scientifically invaluable but are representative of other similar rocks that were brought back by OSIRIS-REx.
“We don’t need to take anything that’s going to have probably the most scientific value, so we’re on the lookout for things that we have now greater than one in every of,” Francis McCubbin, an astromaterials curator at Johnson Space Center, said at an Oct. 11 press conference in response to a matter from collectSPACE.com. “Normally we wish at the very least 4 of any sort of thing before we start using it for something else, and people are the samples which might be going to go the museums.”
“And they will be amazing. I can not wait for the general public to get a chance to have a look at these beautiful samples,” said McCubbin.
Along with the piece of Bennu, which can be in a display case inside a nitrogen-filled capsule with a glass viewing pane, visitors to the National Museum of Natural History may even see scale models of the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft, on loan from Lockheed Martin, and the Atlas V 411 rocket that carried the spacecraft, courtesy of United Launch Alliance. The display may even include a video of interviews and imagery from the mission.
“This exhibit is our first likelihood to share this incredible journey,” said McCoy.