Tag: asteroid

Berkeley Lab Helps Explore Mysteries of Asteroid Bennu

Berkeley Lab Helps Explore Mysteries of Asteroid Bennu

The Advanced Light Source and Molecular Foundry provided powerful tools to study asteroid samples returned by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Researchers found a telltale set of salts formed by evaporation that illuminate Bennu’s watery past.

During the past year, there’s been an unusual set of samples at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab): material gathered from the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu when it was roughly 200 million miles from Earth.

Berkeley Lab is one of more than 40 institutions investigating Bennu’s chemical makeup to better understand how our solar system and planets evolved. In a new study published today in the journal Nature, researchers found evidence that Bennu comes from an ancient wet world, with some material from the coldest regions of the solar system, likely beyond the orbit of Saturn. 

The asteroid contained a set of salty mineral deposits that formed in an exact sequence when a brine evaporated, leaving clues about the type of water that flowed billions of years ago. Brines could be a productive broth for cooking up some of the key ingredients of life, and the same type of minerals are found in dried-up lake beds on Earth (such as Searles Lake in California) and have been observed on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

“It’s an amazing privilege to be able to study asteroid material, direct from space,” said Matthew Marcus, a Berkeley Lab scientist who runs the Advanced Light Source (ALS) beamline where some of the samples were studied and who wrote one of the programs used to analyze their chemical composition. “We have highly specialized instruments that can tell us what Bennu is made of and help reveal its history.”

The samples from Bennu were gathered by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, the first U.S. mission to return samples from an asteroid. The mission returned nearly 122 grams of material from Bennu – the largest sample ever captured in space and returned to Earth from an extraterrestrial body beyond the Moon.

Marcus teamed up with Scott Sandford from NASA Ames Research Center and Zack Gainsforth from the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory to study the Bennu sample using scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) at the ALS. By varying the energy of the X-rays, they were able to determine the presence (or absence) of specific chemical bonds at the nanometer scale and map out the different chemicals found in the asteroid. The science team discovered that some of the last salts to evaporate from the brine were mixed into the rock at the finest levels.

“This sort of information provides us with important clues about the processes, environments, and timing that formed the samples,” Sandford said. “Understanding these samples is important, since they represent the types of materials that were likely seeded on the surface of the early Earth and may have played a role in the origins and early evolution of life.”

At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, researchers used a beam of electrons to image the same Bennu samples with transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The Foundry also helped prepare the samples for the experiments run at the ALS. Experts used an ion beam to carve out microscopic sections of the material that are about a thousand times thinner than a sheet of paper.

“Being able to examine the same exact atoms using both STXM and TEM removed many of the uncertainties in interpreting our data,” Gainsforth said. “We were able to confirm that we really were seeing a ubiquitous phase formed by evaporation. It took a lot of work to get Bennu to give up its secrets, but we are delighted with the final result.” 

This is not the first time the ALS and Molecular Foundry have studied material from space. Researchers also used the two facilities to investigate samples from the asteroid Ryugu, building up our understanding of our early solar system. And there’s still more to come, with additional studies of Bennu at both the STXM and infrared beamlines at the ALS planned for the coming year.

Read more on ALS website

#EBSstory Asteroid Bennu’s samples investigated at the ESRF

#EBSstory Asteroid Bennu’s samples investigated at the ESRF

Scientists from the Schwiete Cosmochemistry Laboratory at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany and the University of Ghent in Belgium have come to the ESRF to study minuscule samples from Asteroid Bennu, after they were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission on 24 September 2023.

The asteroid Bennu is a scientific gem. Asteroids are airless remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Early analysis led by NASA has indicated that asteroid Bennu appears to be very rich in carbon and shows evidence for hydration, which scientists believe can shed light on the origin of life and the Solar System. “It is a primitive carbonaceous asteroid, a so-called near-Earth object located within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and, because it hasn’t undergone the geological processes known for example from Earth and other planets, we think its composition can provide us with clues about the beginning of the Solar System”, says Dr. Beverley Tkalcec, lead scientist in the team at ESRF and geoscientist at the Goethe University Frankfurt and specialised in space samples.

After the return of the OSIRIS-REx mission, NASA sent out samples of the asteroid to  scientists across the world for further investigation, including long-term ESRF users from the Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany) and University of Ghent (Belgium). They have come to the ESRF this week to  analyse some of the precious samples on the high-energy ESRF beamline ID15A. “The targeted  minerals in our samples are less than half a millimetre in size and the concentration of some of the elements we want to find is of the range of  parts per million”, explains Laszlo Vincze, professor from the University of Ghent and leading the synchrotron analysis of the samples.

The researchers want to track and quantify individual minerals enriched with Rare Earth Elements (REE), as tracers of asteroidal processes. These minerals might have changed after being in contact with water. “It is like finding a needle in a haystack, so we need a really high flux to study these samples and this is exactly what the ESRF offers today with the new EBS”, adds Vincze. The experiments use X-ray fluorescence combining high incident energies of 90 keV with a 300 nm resolution scanning capability and a new high-count rate high-efficiency fluorescence detector.

Read more on ESRF website

Image: The asteroid Bennu

Credit: NASA

Asteroid Bennu to be analysed at Diamond by scientists from the Natural History Museum

Asteroid Bennu to be analysed at Diamond by scientists from the Natural History Museum

These measurements may reveal insights into the origins of life in our solar system

After an amazing journey, a grain from the asteroid Bennu will be brought to Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron, for scientific measurements.  The grain is from the 100 milligrams of sample sent to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, a small fraction of the approximately 70 grams of Bennu rock and dust brought back by NASA’s (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, USA) OSIRIS-REx mission. It will be subject to intensive analysis at the Dual Imaging And Diffraction (DIAD) instrument in Diamond by Dr Ashley King and his team from the NHM and other OSIRIS-REx collaborators at the Open, Oxford and Manchester Universities.  

The DIAD beamline at Diamond is a ‘one of a kind’ scientific instrument that can extract chemical composition information and enable virtual dissection at an unprecedented level of detail, non-destructively. This will provide a wealth of scientific data and new knowledge about the asteroid, and the origins of our solar system. 

The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, spacecraft launched to the near-Earth asteroid, Bennu on Sept. 8, 2016.  In October 2020 it collected a sample of rocks and dust from its surface 330 million km (205 million miles) from Earth. The material, collected by the NASA mission, took almost three years to be returned to Earth (Utah desert, US) this Sept. 24, 2023.  

Read more on the Diamond website

Image: Dr Sharif Ahmed from Diamond Light Source and Dr Ashley King from the Natural History Museum with the Bennu asteroid sample

Credit: Diamond Light Source

Vestiges of the Early Solar System in Ryugu Asteroid

Vestiges of the Early Solar System in Ryugu Asteroid

Samples returned to Earth from the asteroid Ryugu, analyzed in part at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), revealed that the building blocks of life formed 4.6 billions years ago in the extreme cold of space, followed by reaction with water.

The dark, coal-like organic matter in the carbonaceous asteroid could have contributed to the formation of habitable planetary environments.

In 2014, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. Its mission: to collect and return samples from the near-Earth asteroid, Ryugu. Asteroids are excellent time capsules, preserving material sourced from the early solar system in pristine condition. With such samples, scientists aim to learn more about how extraterrestrial organic compounds were formed and modified, and whether this material could have eventually seeded life on Earth. Although meteorites can provide valuable information along these lines, they are subject to terrestrial weathering and other contamination from a planet teeming with life.

Hayabusa2 returned to Earth in 2020 to drop off a capsule containing about 5 grams of extraterrestrial material. The spacecraft then left Earth orbit for an extended mission to a smaller asteroid, called 1998 KY26. The samples it left behind were carefully curated and distributed to teams around the world for study.

In the portion of the sample analysis described here, an international team of 130 researchers, led by Hikaru Yabuta at Hiroshima University, received a share of the irreplaceable Ryugu particles for studies of their organic (carbon-based) content. They examined intact Ryugu grains and insoluble carbonaceous residues isolated by acid treatment.

At ALS Beamline 5.3.2.2, the researchers used scanning transmission x-ray microscopy (STXM) to identify discrete grains of organic material (about 200 nm in size) for further examination by x-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy. The beamline enables the acquisition of elemental maps and functional group compositions in submicron-sized sample areas with a spatial resolution below 30 nm.

Read more on the ALS website

Image: Artwork showing the Hayabusa2 spacecraft retrieving a sample from the surface of asteroid Ryugu

Credit: Akihiro Ikeshita

Asteroid impact in slow motion

Asteroid impact in slow motion

High-pressure study solves 60-year-old mystery

For the first time, researchers have recorded live and in atomic detail what happens to the material in an asteroid impact. The team of Falko Langenhorst from the University of Jena and Hanns-Peter Liermann from DESY simulated an asteroid impact with the mineral quartz in the lab and pursued it in slow motion in a diamond anvil cell, while monitoring it with DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III. The observation reveals an intermediate state in quartz that solves a decades-old mystery about the formation of characteristic lamellae in quartz hit by an asteroid. Quartz is ubiquitous on the Earth’s surface, and is, for example, the major constituent of sand. The analysis helps to better understand traces of past impacts, and may also have significance for entirely different materials. The researchers present their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

Large asteroid impacts can melt significant amounts of material from Earth’s crust (artist’s impression). Credit: NASA, Don Davis

Asteroid impacts are catastrophic events that create huge craters and sometimes melt parts of Earth’s bedrock.“ Nevertheless, craters are often difficult to detect on Earth, because erosion, weathering and plate tectonics cause them to disappear over millions of years,” Langenhorst explains. Therefore, minerals that undergo characteristic changes due to the force of the impact often serve as evidence of an impact. For example, quartz sand (which chemically is silicon dioxide, SiO2) is gradually transformed into glass by such an impact, with the quartz grains then being crisscrossed by microscopic lamellae. This structure can only be explored in detail under an electron microscope. It can be seen in material from the relatively recent and prominent Barringer crater in Arizona, USA, for example.

Read more on the DESY website

Image: Large asteroid impacts can melt significant amounts of material from Earth’s crust (artist’s impression)

Credit: NASA, Don Davis

Ancient asteroid grains provide insight into the evolution of our solar system

Ancient asteroid grains provide insight into the evolution of our solar system

The UK’s national synchrotron facility, Diamond Light Source, was used by a large, international collaboration to study grains collected from a near-Earth asteroid to further our understanding of the evolution of our solar system.

Researchers from the University of Leicester brought a fragment of the Ryugu asteroid to Diamond’s Nanoprobe beamline I14 where a special technique called X-ray Absorption Near Edge Spectroscopy (XANES) was used to map out the chemical states of the elements within the asteroid material, to examine its composition in fine detail. The team also studied the asteroid grains using an electron microscope at Diamond’s electron Physical Science Imaging Centre (ePSIC).

Julia Parker is the Principal Beamline Scientist for I14 at Diamond. She said:

The X-ray Nanoprobe allows scientists to examine the chemical structure of their samples at micron to nano lengthscales, which is complemented by the nano to atomic resolution of the imaging at ePSIC. It’s very exciting to be able to contribute to the understanding of these unique samples, and to work with the team at Leicester to demonstrate how the techniques at the beamline, and correlatively at ePSIC, can benefit future sample return missions.

The data collected at Diamond contributed to a wider study of the space weathering signatures on the asteroid. The pristine asteroid samples enabled the collaborators to explore how space weathering can alter the physical and chemical composition of the surface of carbonaceous asteroids like Ryugu.

The researchers discovered that the surface of Ryugu is dehydrated and that it is likely that space weathering is responsible. The findings of the study, published today in Nature Astronomy, have led the authors to conclude that asteroids that appear dry on the surface may be water-rich, potentially requiring revision of our understanding of the abundances of asteroid types and the formation history of the asteroid belt.

Read more on the Diamond website

Image: Image taken at E01 ePSIC of Ryugu serpentine and Fe oxide minerals.

Credit: ePSIC/University of Leicester.

The history of one of the oldest objects in the Solar system unveiled

The history of one of the oldest objects in the Solar system unveiled

An international team of scientists have unveiled details of the history of the asteroid Ryugu, a truly ancient object in the Solar system, after the Hayabusa2 mission brought samples from this asteroid back to Earth. The ESRF was one of the institutes involved in sample characterization, on ID15A. The results are published in Science.

The asteroid Ryugu, located at 200 million kilometres from the Earth, is one of the most primitive objects of the solar system. The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 explored it from 2018 until it came back to Earth two years later with minuscule multiple samples from the asteroid.

Two years later, and thanks to the international collaboration of institutes led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the first results on the analysis of the samples shed light on the history of Ryugu, from its formation to its collisional destruction.

Researchers used cosmochemical and physical methods at universities and institutes, including the ESRF and four other synchrotron radiation facilities in Japan, United States, and Europe.

The results combined with computer simulation have allowed scientists to picture the origins of Ryugu:  the Ryugu parent body accumulated about 2 million years after the formation of the solar system, and then heated up to about 50°C over the next 3 million years, resulting in chemical reactions between water and rock. The size of the impactor that destroyed the Ryugu parent body, which is about 100 km in diameter, is at most 10 km in diameter, and that the present-day Ryugu is composed of material from a region far from the impact point.

What the data explain

In particular, the seventeen Ryugu samples analysed contain particles (such as Ca- and Al-rich inclusions) that were formed in high-temperature environments (>1000°C). These high-temperature particles are thought to have formed near the Sun and then migrated to the outer solar system, where Ryugu was formed. This indicates that large-scale mixing of materials occurred between the inner and outer solar system at the time of its birth.

Based on the detection of the magnetic field left in the Ryugu samples, it is highly likely that the original asteroid from which the current Ryugu descended (Ryugu’s parent body) was born in the darkness of nebular gas, far from the Sun, where sunlight cannot reach.

The scientists also discovered liquid water trapped in a crystal in a sample. This water was carbonated water containing salts and organic matter, which was once present in the Ryugu parent body. Crystals shaped as coral reefs grew from the liquid water that existed inside Ryugu’s parent body. Rocks that were deeper underground contained more water than those in the surface.

Read more on the ESRF website

Image: A coloured view of the C-type asteroid 162173 Ryugu, seen by the ONC-T camera on board of Hayabusa2.

Credit: JAXA Hayabusa 2

The reign of the dinosaurs ended in spring

The reign of the dinosaurs ended in spring

The asteroid that killed nearly all dinosaurs struck Earth during springtime.  An international team of scientists from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Uppsala University (Sweden), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and the ESRF, the European Synchrotron (France), have determined when the meteorite crashed onto the Earth, after analysing the remains of fish that died just after the impact. Their results are published in the journal Nature today.

Around 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub meteorite crashed into the Earth, in what today is the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, marking the demise of dinosaurs and end of the Cretaceous period. This mass extinction still puzzles scientists today, as it was one of the most selective in the history of life: all non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites, and most marine reptiles disappeared, whilst mammals, birds, crocodiles, and turtles survived.

A team of scientists from the Vrije Universiteit, Uppsala University, and the ESRF have now shed light on the circumstances surrounding the diverse extinction across the different groups. The answers came from the bones of fish that died moments after the meteorite struck.

Read more on the ESRF website

Image: Melanie During points to a section of a Paddlefish dentary showing high bone cell density (i.e. summer)

Credit: Melanie During

Analysing asteroid Ryugu samples

Analysing asteroid Ryugu samples

The asteroid Ryugu samples brought back by JAXA’s asteroid explorer “Hayabusa2” in December 2020 are analyzed by six initial analysis teams for one year from June 2021. Among the initial analysis teams, the “Stone Material Analysis Team” and the “Organic Macromolecule Analysis Team” conducts their analysis at the Photon Factory, KEK.

It is thought that asteroids such as Ryugu may have brought water and organic matter to the Earth in the past. By integrating the results of each team’s analysis, we will be closer to solving the great mystery of how life came to be on the Earth.

Read more on the HAYABUSA2-IMSS website

Image : Primordial solar system.