The OSIRIS-REx mission was a spacecraft that launched in 2016
to collect asteroid samples from the carbonaceous asteroid Bennu.
And a carbonaceous asteroid means it's a likely storage for
prebiotic compounds.
So organic compounds that could have been the building blocks for life on Earth
and potentially other places in our solar system.
And some of these samples may even have remnants from before the solar system,
presolar grains that allow us to study the raw material that made
ours and other planets.
With us bringing this particular asteroid back,
this is some of the most pristine material of asteroid sample that we have in
our current collections.
The Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division,
or the ARES Division,
is a division within NASA that focuses on the study and
preservation of rocks from space.
This is a group of a really diverse range of scientists and engineers that are
exploring our solar system through studying samples,
developing things like lunar simulants,
being part of NASA missions that range from the exploration of Mars,
including the Curiosity and Perseverance rover, supporting the Artemis missions,
as well as OSIRIS-REx.
We have meteorites that fall onto Earth.
They are altered by the Earth's atmosphere.
They have been exposed to Earth's chemical compositions.
They are contaminated samples.
And in our curation labs, we carefully work on samples in clean rooms,
nitrogen atmospheric glove boxes that protect the samples from Earth's atmosphere,
oxygen and humidity.
You don't want to study us on samples.
You wanna study the actual samples in its original state.
And so pristinity within curation is very important and we go to great lengths to
make that happen.
Every time we do that kind of probing investigation,
we learn something new about the nature of the universe and ourselves.
3, 2, 1.
I feel like humans since the beginning of time have always been explorers.
We have not stayed in one place. We have ventured out to various continents,
and eventually that was gonna happen with planets or asteroid bodies.
Whether it's Artemis or Mars,
everything we've learned on OSIRIS-REx is going to further our
knowledge and our technology development for the next set of missions
that we have coming up.
These samples are here on Earth for future generations.
50 years from now,
we can be studying these with instruments we couldn't have imagined before.
So I think that's one of the most important aspects of this mission,
is bringing the samples back.
We've waited for seven years,
and now we can reveal what's inside.