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[ music ]

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My name is Jason Dworkin. I'm the director of the Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory at NASA Goddard.

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I'm also the Project Scientist for OSIRIS-REx.

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We're interested in studying the origin and evolution of life on the Earth and other bodies in the solar system,

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from the perspective of understanding simple organic chemistry.

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We don't understand what happened in the ancient Earth. Most of that record is lost by subduction and other geochemical processes.

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However, meteorites and the asteroid Bennu witnessed the chemistry of the early solar system.

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A problem with studying meteorites is that they invariably land on the ground:

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they land in ice in Antarctica, for example, or in dirt or soil,

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and life very rapidly contaminates these samples.

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By going to collect the samples from an asteroid we can keep the samples pristine,

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by having very tight controls over what the spacecraft is made out of and how it's returned, and archived and distributed around the world.

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OSIRIS-REx is a NASA mission which launches in 2016 and goes to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu,

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which is a organic-rich, very dark, primitive asteroid,

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orbits the asteroid for about a year, studies it in great detail, and then collects a sample,

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and returns it to the Earth for worldwide distribution and study.

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Samples from Bennu will be returned to Earth in 2023. They land at the UTTR facility in Utah,

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then are transported to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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Any scientist in the world can write a proposal to request some sample and justify what they'll get from it.

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The Bennu samples will contain riches which can be studied today

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and are in many ways beyond technology right now to study.

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For example, in this laboratory we've been studying samples brought back by the Apollo missions.

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The analysis is being performed by a woman who was not born yet when the samples were returned,

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using instrumentation that was not designed, asking questions not thought possible.

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This is the value of sample return: it's a gift to the Earth that keeps giving generation after generation

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as technologies advance and as new people come up with new questions that we're not smart enough now to think about.

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[ music ]

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