Bay Area team helps get rocks of asteroid that may one day hit Earth

NASA says there is a 1 in 1,750 chance that Earth gets hit next century by the asteroid Bennu, which is wider across than Salesforce Tower is tall. But we already have some of its 4.5 billion-year-old rocks and dust right here in the United States.

That’s thanks in part to the NASA Ames Research Center in the Bay Area, which helped land NASA’s first ever asteroid sample in Utah on Sunday morning. Ames scientists developed the protective material for the return capsule to withstand high reentry temperatures, and also designed and tested the canister’s air filter.

The arrival of the 8.8-ounce sample marks the end of a seven-year journey, according to a Sunday press release from NASA. In a series of blog posts since the spacecraft’s launch in 2016, the agency has described OSIRIS-REx’s trajectory in detail: After launch, it traveled more than 1 billion miles to reach and then orbit Bennu, mapped the rocky object in detail, collected the sample in one high-stakes touchdown on Oct. 20, 2020, and then began the long journey back to Earth the following May.

NASA wrote Sunday morning that the spacecraft released the capsule containing the sample from 63,000 miles away from Earth; four hours later, the container broke through Earth’s atmosphere off the coast of California. Parachutes then slowed its final descent to a military range near Salt Lake City.

Ames has long been one of NASA’s key research laboratories. A Bay Area NASA team in the 1980s developed “phenolic-impregnated carbon ablator,” or “PICA” — a lightweight material that dissipates intense heat by slowly burning away, or “ablating,” according to a post by Ames research scientist Matthew Gasch. Testing facilities at Ames’ labs near Mountain View helped NASA believe that the new samples would be protected, according to a press release two days before touchdown.

The Bennu asteroid became the target of a NASA mission both for its potential, though minute, to slam into Earth in the 22nd century, and for its age. Scientists estimate that the asteroid was formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, in the first 10 million years of our solar system’s history, and so might have clues about the origins of life on Earth.

The sample will be evaluated in Houston, NASA wrote, and distributed in pieces to scientists worldwide over the coming decades, as technology improves.

“Congratulations to the OSIRIS-REx team on a picture-perfect mission — the first American asteroid sample return in history — which will deepen our understanding of the origin of our solar system and its formation,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in Sunday’s press release. “Not to mention, Bennu is a potentially hazardous asteroid, and what we learn from the sample will help us better understand the types of asteroids that could come our way.”