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The OSIRIS-REx mission is a mission that primarily is going to bring a
sample of a primitive asteroid back to Earth so that we can study it completely
uncontaminated by any other reactions on the Earth. The meteorites that we pick up
could have had other interactions with organic materials on the surface of the
Earth, so they're not pristine.
The scientific objectives are to understand
the material that was available for the formation of the Earth the origin of
life things like that at the very beginning of the solar system. In order
to do that we need to bring back a sample and do the analysis of that
sample in our laboratories. We can do much more sophisticated analysis in the
laboratories then we can at the at RQ36. Simply because you can't carry a whole
laboratory with you on a spacecraft,
The reason asteroid research is important is
because the asteroids themselves are leftover remnants of the rocks and the
dust and possibly some of the gas that's embedded in those those rocks and dust
and crevasses, from the early solar system it's material that literally is a
grab-bag of the solar nebula at the time that that grab-bag happened to form
which was probably four-and-a-half billion years ago.
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