8/10/2020 Asteroid Bennu was once part of a space rock with flowing water | New Scientist

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Asteroid Bennu was once part of a space rock with flowing water

SPACE 8 October 2020

By Leah Crane

An illustration of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft descending towards the asteroid Bennu

NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

The asteroid Bennu is a strange little place, but data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is starting to unravel its mysteries.
The spacecraft, which has been orbiting Bennu since December 2018, is gearing up to take a sample from the asteroid’s
surface later this month. In preparation, it has gathered a smorgasbord of information, including hints that Bennu’s parent
asteroid may have had owing water.

Bennu is a type of asteroid called a rubble pile, formed when something smashed into a larger asteroid billions of years ago
and the bits coalesced into many smaller asteroids. By studying Bennu, which is about 500 metres wide, we can learn more
about this parent asteroid, which was probably a few hundred kilometres across.

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8/10/2020 Asteroid Bennu was once part of a space rock with flowing water | New Scientist

When OSIRIS-REx reached Bennu, it spotted something strange: some of the boulders had bright veins up to 150
centimetres long and 14 centimetres thick. These veins are too large to have formed on Bennu itself, says Hannah Kaplan at
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, so they were probably portions of larger cracks on Bennu’s parent that
were up to several kilometres long.
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“They suggest that there was uid owing on fairly large scales on Bennu’s parent asteroid,” says Kaplan. That is because
the veins are made of carbonates, a type of compound that generally forms due to interactions between water and rock, she
says.

Read more: Asteroid Bennu is spewing out dust and rocks to create its own moons

In fact, over 98 per cent of Bennu’s surface seems to be coated in carbonates and organic molecules, complex carbon-bearing
compounds that are seen as precursors to life. Yet despite probably having both water and organics, Bennu’s parent was
unlikely to be teeming with life.

“You’re in the vacuum of space, there’s no atmosphere, you’re looking at a lot of irradiation, it’s cold – you wouldn’t want to
sit on the surface,” says Kaplan. “It’s not a favourable environment per se, but it does have a lot of the factors that make a
place technically habitable.”

One of the main goals of OSIRIS-REx is to investigate the carbon on Bennu because Earth was probably built from rocks
similar to it, and these may have brought the ingredients of life here. “These same types of organics may have been
delivered to early Earth and may have been the start of some of the organic chemistry that led to life as we know it,” says
Kaplan.

There are also differences across the surface of Bennu that are hard to explain. It is covered in boulders, but the largest ones
are mostly in its southern hemisphere. The boulders themselves are strange too, with some being so porous that empty
space appears to comprise up to 55 per cent of them, more than any meteorite we have ever recovered.

There seem to be two populations of rocks: porous, darker-coloured ones and denser, lighter-coloured ones that often have
carbonate veins. These differences aren’t obvious to the human eye – the surface would just seem to be a fairly uniform
dark-grey to us – but they could be critical in helping us gure out how Bennu formed. They may have come from two
different areas in Bennu’s parent body, with the denser rocks coming from deeper underground.

Read more: Inside the mission to stop killer asteroids from smashing into Earth

That wouldn’t answer all of Bennu’s mysteries, though, because some relate to the asteroid’s evolution after it was chipped
off its larger parent body. “The way Bennu’s colour changes over time is quite a bit different than what we have seen on
other planetary surfaces like the moon or other asteroids that we’ve visited,” says Daniella DellaGiustina at the University of
Arizona.

Astronomers can date different areas of Bennu by comparing fresher regions twith more weathered ones, revealing how they
change over time. Rocks on Bennu seem to become more blue, whereas those on other space rocks tend to become more red.
This may be because of how those carbonate- lled rocks interact with the solar wind and micrometeorites differently to
rocks without carbonates, says DellaGiustina.

On 20 October, OSIRIS-REx will take a small sample from Bennu’s surface before heading back towards Earth. When the
sample gets here in 2023, researchers will be able to experiment with them directly, hopefully answering many of these
questions.

“All the characterisation work we’ve done for Bennu basically puts this return sample into context,” says Benjamin Rozitis at
the Open University in the UK. If we can study the sample thoroughly and understand how it relates to the different rocks on
Bennu, that makes it easier to compare Bennu with other asteroids and small bodies.

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8/10/2020 Asteroid Bennu was once part of a space rock with flowing water | New Scientist

“We can’t do a sample return from every interesting place in the solar system, but by studying Bennu globally and trying to
understand it as a small world, we get a much better sense of how Bennu relates to other objects in our solar system that we
might never be able to sample,” says DellaGiustina.

Journal references: Science, DOI:10.1126/science.abc3557, DOI:10.1126/science.abc3660, DOI:10.1126/science.abc3522;

Science Advances, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abd3649, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abc3699, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abc3350

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