官方消息:美国宇航局2月15日证实，四年前，美国宇航局的OSIRIS-Rex宇宙飞船在飞越小行星Bennu时捕获了121.6克原始太空岩石，这是该任务官方科学目标的两倍多。
OSIRIS-Rex于2016年发射，是美国宇航局第一个从小行星上收集样本并将其送回地球的任务，这样科学家就可以研究我们太阳系的起源。在完成了从钻石形状的Bennu上抓取和移动的过程后，该航天器于去年将其罐放入了我们的大气层(SN: 9/22/23)。工程师们迅速将它运送到休斯顿约翰逊航天中心一个专门设计的样品管理中心，在那里它被放在一个密封的手套箱里，以防止地面物质的污染。
虽然研究人员已经能够分析一些岩石和灰尘，但由于几个卡住的螺丝阻止了任何人进入胶囊的全部内容，所以整个样本的称重被推迟了(SN: 10/11/23)。一些聪明的变通办法终于在1月10日解锁了完整的样本，现在它将被分发给世界各地的科学家进行研究。
为了了解工程师们是如何打开罐子的，以及这个样本将教给我们什么样的科学知识，《科学新闻》采访了哈罗德·康诺利，他是新泽西州格拉斯伯勒罗文大学的地质学家，负责监督本努的材料分析。为简洁明了，以下对话经过了编辑。
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SN: Shortly after retrieving the OSIRIS-Rex canister, you were able to collect some sample, right?
Connolly: There was lots of dust on the outside of the canister. That was the first material we got, approximately 1 to 1.1 grams or so of fine dust particles.
SN: What kinds of problems did you face before you could fully open the main sample container?
Connolly: There’s a bunch of fasteners or screws holding the container closed, approximately 32 of them. And two of them we couldn’t loosen enough with the equipment we had. But there’s a mylar flap that moves, which trapped the sample in a container. The curation team at the Johnson Space Center figured out it could just push down the flap. Without removing the plate that was stuck, the team could get sample out from inside the TAGSAM [Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism] head by literally pushing down the mylar flap and scooping it out very gently. We got 70 grams of sample — a lot.
But to access the rest of the sample, they had to create a new kind of ratchet wrench screwdriver. The previous screwdriver was starting to flex a little bit, so you might be breaking the screwdriver.
SN: Can you tell me anything about what you’ve found from the sample you have so far?
Connolly: It’s a serpentinite. It’s an altered rock where the original rocky material has interacted with water, and that original rocky material must have been rich in olivine and pyroxene and some other common rock-forming minerals on Earth, but changed and altered in a beautiful way. That is a geologic puzzle to figure out.
SN: What have we suspected about the history of Bennu that the sample is helping to ////confirm/i/i/i/i?
Connolly: Oh, there’s a lot.
Bennu itself is in a configuration that is not what it originally was. once upon a time, the pieces that became Bennu were in a much different object, probably a heck of a lot bigger. We’re talking soon after the solar system formed, 4.5 billion years ago.
When that object formed, material came together, brought ices with it — and not just water ice, but carbon monoxide and ammonia ice — which means it had to accrete somewhere out past what we call the snow line, out past Mars in the outer solar system. At that distance from the sun, temperatures are low enough for those ices to form.
Eventually, the interior of the larger, original object started to heat up because of radioactivity that’s naturally in the material, and that began to melt the ice and become fluid. Fluid began to interact with the parent body to form new minerals — like serpentinite — from the material that accreted.
We’ll be teasing out how much of it was altered, how much is relic from the pre-accretion stage, how much is actually from stars that died and injected dust into our solar system.
SN: It sounds like a dynamic and complicated history.
Connolly: We’re interested in what happened: How did that original parent body change? Was it impacted by another body and smashed apart to create the larger boulders that eventually came together to form Bennu? And how long has Bennu been in this current configuration? How much had it experienced interaction with the sun or with cosmic rays? All these kinds of processes we can tease out by analyzing teeny tiny little bits of sample.
SN: Do we have any answers to any of these questions?
Connolly: Stay tuned.
?
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