NASA is receiving its first long-awaited sample from an asteroid. OSIRIS-REx visited and collected samples from 101955 Bennu, a carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid. The sample’s return yesterday concludes a seven-year mission, and the contents will be studied by scientists worldwide. SSL research scientist Zack Gainsforth, interviewed by Al Jazeera English for this video, compares the magnitude of potential discoveries to Stardust, an earlier sample return mission for which Gainsforth analyzed cometary particles. “In the case of Stardust [samples], which were comet samples, from just a single tiny grain smaller than a human hair, we were able to set bounds on when Jupiter formed and to know about how much oxygen was present in the early solar system.”
