What comes next for the largest asteroid sample ever recovered in human history?
This week, a sample NASA collected from a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid touched back down on Earth after an incredible journey. So what happens now?
Transcript
00:00 In an amazing 70-year journey, NASA has retrieved the largest asteroid sample ever recovered
00:05 and brought it safely back to Earth.
00:08 Keri Donaldson Hanna is a planetary geologist and an assistant professor at the University
00:13 of Central Florida.
00:14 Thank you so much for joining us, Keri.
00:16 Thanks for inviting me to be here, Jeff.
00:18 Well, this is really cool stuff.
00:19 And we understand that you're part of NASA's science team that has worked on this and other
00:24 NASA projects.
00:26 So first off, what was it like for you to see the capsule landing safely in Utah earlier
00:31 this week?
00:32 It was certainly nerve-wracking seeing the capsule coming down so quickly through the
00:38 atmosphere.
00:39 And it was so exhilarating to just see that little capsule sitting in the desert so sweetly,
00:45 waiting for the scientists to go out and check it out and make sure everything was okay with
00:50 the capsule.
00:52 Really cool stuff.
00:53 Now that it's here, what are the next steps and how is this going to be scientifically
00:57 analyzed?
00:58 Yeah, so initially the sample capsule was tested and assessed to make sure that nothing
01:05 had been breached or nothing had been opened during its entry through the atmosphere.
01:10 And then today it made its way to Johnson Space Center where the curation facility and
01:16 the scientists there are going to start unpacking the sample and starting to see how much sample
01:22 is there, what state the sample is in so that future scientists will be able to write a
01:28 proposal and request sample to analyze it in their own labs across the U.S.
01:35 So at this moment, do we really have a good idea of exactly what was retrieved?
01:38 Are we talking about a large piece or smaller rocks and dust?
01:42 We're talking about anything from the size of dust all the way up to small little rocklets,
01:48 you know, things like quarter-sized, maybe fist-sized.
01:52 And astronomers tell us that this asteroid named Bennu is 4.5 billion years old.
01:57 So what secrets could be learned about our solar system through this?
02:02 And so we're really excited to understand how did water get into the inner parts of
02:07 the solar system, like close to Earth?
02:10 Like how did we get all the water that we see in our oceans today?
02:15 And so that certainly is something that's very compelling for us to understand and we
02:19 believe that asteroids like Bennu have keys to those initial water distributions throughout
02:27 the solar system.
02:28 And then we're also interested in understanding how organics, things that build up different
02:34 forms of life on Earth, how they got into the inner solar system as well.
02:40 As an expert on the moon and asteroids, what are you personally most excited about with
02:44 this discovery, the data that it could provide?
02:47 I'm really excited to be able to look at the sample myself and to measure it in the lab
02:53 facilities similar to our lab facilities that we've measured lots of meteorites in.
02:58 And so to be able to see what Bennu's sample is like and how it compares to all the meteorites
03:04 that we have in various museums across the world will help us better understand things
03:10 that we aren't going to be able to go sample and we aren't going to be able to go orbit
03:15 with a spacecraft.
03:16 All right.
03:17 Well, that's Kerry Donaldson Hanna, planetary geologist and assistant professor at the University
03:23 of Central Florida.
03:24 Kerry, thanks again so much.
03:25 Thanks, Jeff.
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