Asteroid Bennu material shows organic precursor molecules that may have produced ingredients of life first formed from cryogenic ammonia.
On October 15, Lindy Elkins-Tanton gave a talk on NASA’s Psyche mission as part of a Center for Integrative Planetary Science seminar series.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a geologist and planetary scientist, will be the new director of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, effective July 1. She currently leads the NASA Psyche mission to explore an asteroid called Psyche.
When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft passed by the Earth in 2023 and released a sample return capsule, it marked the end of a journey to visit and collect a small piece of an asteroid, but the journey to understanding that material had only just begun.