A professor at the University of Rochester played a key role in the discovery that an asteroid that is relatively close to our planet is carrying the building blocks to life on Earth.
A sample of dust and rocks from the asteroid Bennu, located 186,000 miles away, contained ingredients necessary to kickstart the chemical processes that led to life on our planet, NASA announced Wednesday.
Analysis of the sample also showed that it had the remnants of a briny environment from 4.5 billion years ago. The agency said the findings support the theory that asteroids such as Bennu helped deliver the water and chemical building blocks of life to Earth.
Kevin Righter, an Earth and environmental science professor at the University of Rochester, played a key role in the multi-year OSIRIS-REx mission, through which the 120-gram sample was secured and studied. Specifically, he helped design processes and facilities to shield the samples from as much oxidation or contamination as possible.
"It's a rare opportunity to get material from another body and be able to study it in our labs here, you know, earth-based labs, rather than with instrumentation that might be on a spacecraft," Righter said sitting at a table in his UR office, with posters and placards from the mission hanging on each wall.
Bennu is a 4.5-billion-year-old, carbon-rich asteroid that is a third of a mile wide and orbits the sun. In 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to gather samples from the asteroid, which hurtles through space at 63,300 mph. It briefly touched the asteroid in 2020 to collect that sample and a capsule carrying the gray-black rocks and dust touched down in Utah three years later.
NASA and scientists have studied plenty of the meteorites that descend through Earth's atmosphere and crash into the surface. Antarctica is a hotspot for that activity.
The mission to Bennu was focused on securing a pristine sample from a parent body, not a chunk that fell to Earth, Righter said.
The mission team launched a spacecraft that collected the sample and brought it back to Earth, shielding the materials from Earth's heat and oxygen as it pierced the atmosphere and from surface conditions after it landed.
Righter's role was "curating" the sample — ensuring it was protected from anything that would diminish its value for scientific research. He was particularly involved in the design of a clean room at the Utah site, and another one at NASA facilities in Houston.
Scientists published their findings Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy. The articles stated that researchers found minerals — particularly salts — and the chemical components of proteins and nucleic acids found in DNA and RNA. Some of those have not been observed in meteorites recovered after crashing to earth.
While the findings do not show evidence for life itself, NASA suggests the conditions necessary for life to emerge were widespread across the early solar system.
“The clues we’re looking for are so miniscule and so easily destroyed or altered from exposure to Earth’s environment,” Danny Glavin, a senior sample scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and co-lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper, said in a news release. “That’s why some of these new discoveries would not be possible without a sample-return mission, meticulous contamination-control measures, and careful curation and storage of this precious material from Bennu.”
Righter said the findings are exciting and show the value of sample-return missions. He noted that this was the fourth in U.S. history. Apollo brought back moon rocks, Genesis collected samples of solar winds, and Stardust brought back comet samples.
The mission is winding down, but the samples will be kept for decades and available for other scientists to test and analyze.
"It's really exciting and satisfying to have all of these results come out now and know that there was that I played a small role in making it all happen," Righter said.
