(C) U.S. State Dept This story was originally published by U.S. State Dept and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Touching an asteroid: How U.S. university students study space [1] ['Noelani Kirschner'] Date: 2023-11-16 07:45:40+00:00 Lucas Smith remembers when he realized how lucky he was to research space objects at the University of Arizona’s Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. The doctoral candidate was studying a sample from a meteorite — part of an asteroid that has fallen to Earth — when an adviser walked in and said: “I’ve got a big old box of moon rocks here,” Smith told ShareAmerica. After 50 years of safekeeping, NASA had allocated samples from its Apollo missions — the first to land people on the moon — to universities for research. Now Smith and other researchers are receiving more samples that he says could be a game-changer for scientists’ understanding of our solar system. On September 24, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission delivered to Earth a sample from the asteroid Bennu. A NASA spacecraft’s robotic arm collected the sample in October 2020 when the asteroid was 321 million kilometers from Earth. OSIRIS-REx Mission Implementation Systems Engineer Anjani Polit says the asteroid samples could provide researchers insight into not only the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid but also the beginnings of our planet. “Asteroids like Bennu are time capsules of the early solar system,” she told ShareAmerica. They “could have delivered water and organic molecules to the early Earth, which were potential ingredients for life. There’s so much to be learned from this asteroid sample.” NASA assists higher education NASA has distributed dust samples from the exterior of the capsule that delivered the Bennu samples to Earth and will send additional samples in the future. U.S. universities receiving samples include Boston College, Brown University, the California Institute of Technology, Purdue, Rowan University and the University of Virginia. NASA will also send samples to museums and partners in Canada and Japan. Much of the Bennu material will be preserved for future generations. NASA’s distributions continue its long-standing support for research. Every year, NASA distributes 400 lunar samples to universities in the United States and abroad. Harold Connolly Jr., a professor with the School of Earth & Environment at Rowan University in New Jersey, says sharing samples with researchers of various backgrounds is vital for advancing science. “The [NASA] mission has always been committed to training the next generation of scientists,” says Connolly, who is helping organize distribution of the Bennu samples. A glimpse into the distant past Smith says meteorites and asteroids contain presolar grains that can give scientists clues about the formation of stars — like our sun. While meteorites may be contaminated as they fall to Earth, Smith says that the Bennu samples were retrieved from space, which means they could provide well-preserved specimens of presolar grains. He’s already studied the exterior OSIRIS-REx capsule and says additional samples arriving in the coming months will provide even greater research opportunities. “What fascinates me about them so much is they kind of string together everything,” Smith says. “They reach further back in time than directly studying a planet” itself. [END] --- [1] Url: https://share.america.gov/touching-asteroid-how-us-university-students-study-space/ Published and (C) by U.S. State Dept Content appears here under this condition or license: Public Domain. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/usstate/