蜜芽传媒

Dusty samples from the "most dangerous known rock in the Solar System" have been brought to Earth. The American space agency Nasa landed the materials in a capsule that came down in the West Desert of Utah state.
The samples had been scooped up from the surface of asteroid Bennu in 2020 by the Osiris-Rex spacecraft operating some 300 million kilometres from earth. Nasa wants to learn more about the asteroid, not least because it has an outside chance of hitting our planet in the next 300 years. But more than this, as Dr Jason Dworkin, Chief of the Astrochemistry Laboratory at NASA, told Newsday the material ''may answer lots of questions related to the origin of life''. He has been working on the Osiris-Rex project for nearly two decades and said it's ''a tremendous success to have the samples on the ground and to send to scientists around the world to analyse. 70 percent of the samples will be saved for future generations to study''. The rock and dust samples are thought to be more than four billion years old and he said ''it will take approximately a month to open the capsule in a clean room with highly filtered air''.

(Photo shows experts collecting science data shortly after the capsule from Nasa's Osiris-Rex mission landed at the US Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range, on September 24, 2023 - Credit: Keegan Barber/NASA via Getty Images).