The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, launched in, 2016, will return at least 60 g of asteroid material from (101955) Bennu to Earth. Of particular interest is the nature of returned organics, as they may be representative of the materials that seeded the early Earth and may have played a role in the origin of life. Bennu is a small asteroid that is likely related to carbonaceous chondrites, which contain primitive materials that record the history of volatiles and organic compounds in the early Solar System. It is expected that the samples will contain on the order of a few percent by mass in the form of a complex population of organic compounds that could contain amino acids, carboxylic acids, sugars and related compounds, amphiphiles, PAHs, heterocycles, and other classes of compounds. The population of collected organic compounds will likely be the result of many processes (gas phase, gas-grain, irradiation, hydrothermal, etc.) that occur in a wide variety of environments that were all gathered and subsequently reprocessed in the Bennu parent body. Because each of these processes can leave specific imprints on the final population of organics present, they can serve as a major source of information concerning the formation, evolution, and history of the protosolar nebula and the Bennu parent body. Many of the chemical processes whereby organics are made in space result in isotopic fractionations, particularly in D/H and 15N/14N, that can be measured and used to illuminate their origins. Comets and primitive asteroids may have supplied Earth with materials that could have played key roles in the origin and early evolution of life. The OSIRIS-REx Team will pay particular attention to understanding the nature of organics in the returned sample with an eye towards identifying those materials that are of special astrobiological interest. Studying minute amounts of organics in the returned sample puts special constraints on the design, construction, and implementation of the mission, both to minimize the effects of contaminants and to maximize our understanding of the mission’s organic background. OSIRIS-REx has now successfully acquired samples from Bennu and is scheduled to return the sample to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) on September 24, 2023.

OSIRIS-REx sample return mission: Looking for signs of primitive astrochemical complexity in asteroid (101955) Bennu

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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