NASA Johnson Curation Lab Ready to Reveal OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample

On Sept. 24, 2023, the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer) spacecraft returned to Earth after a seven-year journey in which it explored asteroid Bennu and collected samples from its surface. The sample has been returned to the NASA Johnson Space Center's Curation Lab to be opened, studied, and distributed to scientists around the world for decades of ground-breaking research to learn more about our planet, the solar system and the organics that may reveal more about the origins of life on Earth. The sample was publicly revealed on Oct. 11, 2023.

What is said in the film

The OSIRIS-REx mission was a spacecraft that launched in 2016 to collect asteroid samples from the carbonaceous asteroid Bennu. And a carbonaceous asteroid means it's a likely storage for prebiotic compounds. So organic compounds that could have been the building blocks for life on Earth and potentially other places in our solar system. And some of these samples may even have remnants from before the solar system, presolar grains that allow us to study the raw material that made ours and other planets. With us bringing this particular asteroid back, this is some of the most pristine material of asteroid sample that we have in our current collections.

The Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division, or the ARES Division, is a division within NASA that focuses on the study and preservation of rocks from space. This is a group of a really diverse range of scientists and engineers that are exploring our solar system through studying samples, developing things like lunar simulants, being part of NASA missions that range from the exploration of Mars, including the Curiosity and Perseverance rover, supporting the Artemis missions, as well as OSIRIS-REx. We have meteorites that fall onto Earth. They are altered by the Earth's atmosphere. They have been exposed to Earth's chemical compositions.

They are contaminated samples. And in our curation labs, we carefully work on samples in clean rooms, nitrogen atmospheric glove boxes that protect the samples from Earth's atmosphere, oxygen and humidity. You don't want to study us on samples. You wanna study the actual samples in its original state. And so pristinity within curation is very important and we go to great lengths to make that happen.

Every time we do that kind of probing investigation, we learn something new about the nature of the universe and ourselves. 3, 2, 1. I feel like humans since the beginning of time have always been explorers. We have not stayed in one place. We have ventured out to various continents, and eventually that was gonna happen with planets or asteroid bodies.

Whether it's Artemis or Mars, everything we've learned on OSIRIS-REx is going to further our knowledge and our technology development for the next set of missions that we have coming up. These samples are here on Earth for future generations. 50 years from now, we can be studying these with instruments we couldn't have imagined before. So I think that's one of the most important aspects of this mission, is bringing the samples back. We've waited for seven years, and now we can reveal what's inside.

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