2023-12-25 18:31:22
Par Tristan Vey
Published 1 minute ago, Updated 1 minute ago
The capsule sent by NASA containing 100 mg of asteroid samples entrusted to French scientists. Vincent Guigoz/CNRS-CRHEA
REPORTAGE – A laboratory at the Côte d’Azur Observatory had the privilege of being entrusted with dust brought back to Earth by the Osiris-Rex mission. Researchers will attempt to retrace the history of this body, a witness to the first moments of the Solar System.
Special envoy to Nice
They are simply placed on a desk, next to a computer, a pot filled with pens and some administrative documents, in a plastic box which could just as easily contain business cards. Inside this box, two pairs of thin glass slides are held together by black double-clip forceps. It almost looks like a beginner chemist’s kit. Each of these small glass prisons contains some black dust, similar to that which one would obtain by crushing the end of a pencil lead. No one could suspect that these few pieces of carbon dust constitute one of the most precious materials in the world: fragments of the asteroid Bennu, brought back to Earth in October by the American probe Osiris-Rex.
Also read: The spectacular images of the Osiris-Rex probe “hitting” the asteroid Bennu
Let’s do a quick calculation: the total budget for the NASA mission is estimated at $1.2 billion. The mass of the samples collected (which is not yet known with…
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