60
‘It’s amazing’: scientists analyse 4.6bn-year-old dark dust from Bennu asteroid
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
60 points (100.0% liked)
United Kingdom
4105 readers
32 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A teaspoon’s worth of dark dust and granules scooped from an asteroid 200m miles from Earth has arrived at the Natural History Museum in London, where scientists are preparing to unlock its secrets.
Researchers at the museum received 100mg of the pristine material, which at 4.6bn years old dates back to the dawn of the solar system, after Nasa’s Osiris-Rex mission stopped at asteroid Bennu in 2020 and returned samples to Earth in September.
The spacecraft briefly touched down on Bennu, an asteroid that has a 1-in-1,750 chance of colliding with Earth in the next 300 years, and gathered more than 60g of untouched material, the largest amount brought back from space since the Apollo program.
Scientists expect to study the samples for decades as they seek to understand how the solar system formed and whether asteroids delivered substantial amounts of water to Earth and other planets.
The first two years of research at the Natural History Museum will focus on non-destructive tests, such as X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy to learn about Bennu’s mineral composition and structure.
The museum is home to one of the world’s leading meteorite collections, and the staff are well-used to handling small amounts of extremely precious materials from outer space.
The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 59%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!