Sourced from a 121.6-gram sample returned to Earth by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, a small speck of material from the asteroid Bennu sits on a prepared microscope slide in an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Meteorites are messengers from the depths of primordial time—cast-off fragments of asteroids and comets that formed alongside our sun from raw materials predating our star itself. But their messages are often muddled by their final, fateful encounter with Earth—charred in their fiery plunge through our planet’s atmosphere and contaminated by our world’s ever-shifting environmental tumult. And unlike a typical piece of lost mail, they don’t come with a return address to reveal their provenance.
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