Last week flew the Osiris-Rex bypass in less than 19 km distance from the asteroid, which is around the 2.25 million kilometres from the earth, and found traces of hydrogen and oxygen, which are the ingredients to the water, which in turn is potential to life.
Bennu is around 500 meters in diameter and revolves around the sun at about the same distance as the earth. After completed mission, the probe to take samples from the asteroid to the earth.
” We have found water-rich minerals from the solar system’s beginning, which is exactly the type of samples we came here to find and later take back to earth, says scientist Dante Lauretta at the University of Arizona.
can collide with the earth sometime late in the 2100’s.
Asteroids are any residual debris from the time when the solar system was formed around 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists think that asteroids and comets early in collided with earth may have had with organic ingredients and water that made life could evolve on the planet.
”When samples of the material will come back to earth in the year 2023, scientists will have a treasure chest of new information about the history and evolution of our solar system,” says Amy Simon, a researcher at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in a statement.