Asteroid Bennu Has A Surprisingly Watery Past, Researchers Say

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An early analysis of a sample collected from the asteroid Bennu suggests that the space rock had an unexpectedly water-rich past — and it may have even splintered off from an ancient ocean world.

The NASA OSIRIS-REx mission scooped up the 4.3-ounce (121.6-gram) pristine sample from the near-Earth asteroid in 2020 and returned it to Earth last September .

An initial review of some of the sample, shared in October, suggested that the asteroid contained a large amount of carbon .

A study detailing the findings appeared Wednesday in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science .

"OSIRIS-REx gave us exactly what we hoped: a large pristine asteroid sample rich in nitrogen and carbon from a formerly wet world," said study coauthor Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.

The biggest surprise was finding magnesium-sodium phosphate within the sample, which remote sensing didn't initially detect when OSIRIS-REx, or the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security — Regolith Explorer mission, was orbiting Bennu.