First hint of asteroid sample promises ‘lifetime of work’ for Canadian scientists

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Kim Tait was in Buffalo last Sunday morning cheering on her twin boys at a hockey tournament.

But between plays she was anxiously keeping an eye on a live steam on her phone: A NASA team in Utah was preparing for the arrival of a space capsule bearing a precious sample captured from an asteroid.

Finally came the moment she and everyone else affiliated with the OSIRIS-REx mission was waiting for: The falling capsule’s main parachute opened, ensuring its safe arrival on an open stretch of desert.

“All I wanted to hear was that the chute deployed,” said Dr. Tait, who is senior curator of mineralogy at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. “Then I knew I could watch the rest later.”

The next day, Dr. Tait was at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, witnessing the newly arrived capsule being wheeled into a clean room for examination. By Friday, she had become the first Canadian involved with the mission to directly view material from the asteroid Bennu, which the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured three years ago.

So far, it amounts to a residue of black powder that was visible around the inner rim of the sample canister when it was cracked opened, like a clam shell, in a nitrogen-filled glovebox.

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Scientists have spent the better part of this week carefully gathering every loose grain of that material before proceeding further. And though it amounts to only a fraction of a teaspoon, the powder already appears to be what scientists were broadly expecting to get from one of the solar system’s 4.5-billion-year-old building blocks.

“There’s a lifetime of work I could be doing on that amount of material,” said Dr. Tait, whose work at the ROM includes the mineralogical analysis of meteorites.

Up next will be the sample collection head that the spacecraft plunged into the surface of the asteroid and is now stowed inside the canister. It is there that science team members are expecting to find a more significant cache of material in the coming days.

Exactly how much is a key question for Canada, since the country’s participation in the mission guarantees that it will receive a 1/25th share of whatever was retrieved. The larger the total amount, the bigger the possibilities become for Canadian researchers.

According to Caroline-Emmanuelle Morisset, a program scientist with the Canadian Space Agency, the plan is for Canada to take possession of its share in two batches. The first will be selected as soon as possible, to acquire at least some material in the most pristine state possible.

“Then the intent is to select the second portion after a few months, once the sample has been characterized in studies, so that we can select something that is really representative of the whole sample,” Dr. Morisset said.

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None of Canada’s share will be making the journey home, however, until a facility to permanently house the samples has been built. The agency is evaluating proposals from contractors to take on the task. The goal is to ensure that the material can be maintained in a state that is untouched by Earth’s atmosphere for years to come.

“This isn’t just about the science that’s being done in the next year or two. This is about the science that’s being done for the next several decades,” said Tim Haltigan, the Canadian Space Agency’s senior mission scientist for planetary exploration.

Dr. Tait, who is involved in the selection and curation of the Canadian sample, said that contingency plans have been developed so that some of the work of “containerizing” the sample for future studies can proceed next week even if NASA is affected by a U.S. federal government shutdown.

At least four Canadian researchers are scheduled to receive additional portions of the asteroid sample for some of the mission team’s initial studies.

Among them will be Mike Daly, a professor at York University in Toronto and the principal investigator for the Canadian laser system that helped guide OSIRIS-REx to a safe sampling site. He is preparing to measure the thermal properties of the material, which should help scientists understand how Bennu and similar asteroids respond to solar heating, an effect that can slightly alter an asteroid’s orbit and add to uncertainty over the risk of future collisions with Earth.

University of Calgary geologist Alan Hildebrand will focus on the material properties of the sample, while geochemist Dominique Weis at the University of British Columbia plans to dissolve a small quantity of Bennu in acid to determine its precise elemental composition.

Ed Cloutis at the University of Winnipeg will be among the researchers studying the sample using infrared light, to help detect larger carbon-chain molecules that could have been precursors to early life on Earth.

“The big picture is to understand how complex were the organic molecules on these asteroids and whether life could have got a bit of a kick-start by asteroids bringing those molecules to Earth,” Dr. Cloutis said.

Japan will also receive a share of material in exchange for access to a sample from a different asteroid that a Japanese mission returned in 2020.

Meanwhile, scientists in the United States, where the bulk of the Bennu sample will remain, are enthusiastic about the studies they can conduct to help illuminate the origin and nature of asteroids.

Richard Binzel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who published his first research paper on asteroids in 1974, said the successful return of the OSIRIS-REx sample marks the start of a new era.

“To go from studying asteroids as just points of light in a telescope, and then see them turn into laboratory samples – it’s simply phenomenal and it’s beyond anything I expected when I began studying asteroids 50 years ago,” Dr. Binzel said.