Joe Harker
When NASA landed a probe on an asteroid and took samples they brought back some incredibly valuable things to Earth.
The official name of this chunk of space rock is 101955 Bennu, which we'll call 'Bennu' for short because the numbers seem rather superfluous in this conversation.
A spacecraft launched in 2016 was able to reach Bennu two years later and searched for a good landing spot on the chunk of space rock hurtling around our planet.
Between 20 October 2020 and 10 May 2021 the OSIRIS-REx craft was on the asteroid where it had successfully collected a sample to bring back to humanity.
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On 24 September 2023, seven years and 16 days after it first launched, the spacecraft made it back to Earth with a sample from the asteroid, where scientists had a bit of a job actually opening up the capsule and it wasn't fully cracked open until 14 January 2024.
According to Astronomy.com, what NASA found in their first analysis of the Bennu sample indicated that water had once flowed through the asteroid.
Subsequent research led by Sara Russell of the Natural History Museum in London found more information about this in the form of a lack of chondrules, little rounded grains of rock found in meteorites.
She said: "The aqueous alteration would have destroyed the chondrules it may have had."
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If you're wondering what chondrules are, they're small, microscopic rocks that are named after the Greek word for 'grain' and are thought to be part of the foundational building blocks of planets.
Bennu had been predicted to be rich in water but the discovery confirmed that, while the rocks recovered from the asteroid sample are unlike any others found before meaning that the mission to space recovered something truly unique.
The Bennu asteroid was first discovered in 1999 and the name came from the winning entry in a contest to name an asteroid, with a young child called Michael Puzio suggesting the winning name after the Ancient Egyptian mythological bird of the same name.
Studying the asteroid has shown that it is actually speeding up slightly as it spins around in space, as every 100 years the time it takes to complete a full rotation is reduced by one second.
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Now we'll have to see how it does without the chunk of rock we extracted from it, while we can content ourselves with the discovery that water once flowed through the asteroid and there are rocks from Bennu which look like nothing else we've ever seen.