Year Book 2023 | From Apollo to OSIRIS-REx: Carnegie Science and the Dawn of a New Era in Cosmic Exploration

What if we could hold the cosmos in our hands?

For centuries, humanity’s quest to understand the cosmos has relied on distant observation and serendipitous discovery. Astronomers observed objects from afar while planetary scientists relied on studying the meteorites that found their way to Earth’s surface. These methods, however, presented an incomplete narrative, obscured by vast distances and selective processes that allow only certain materials to reach our planet’s surface.

Nothing can compare to the depth of information we can collect from going directly to the source. Imagine the difference between piecing together a story from fragmented pages and having entire chapters of the Solar System’s saga in hand. These missions both groundtruth our observations and allow us to compare the composition of Earth-side samples to that of the celestial objects themselves—all while providing vast new sets of data that help us piece together the early history of our Solar System.

The Apollo program marked the beginning of this new age of exploration, starting with our closest celestial neighbor—the Moon. Between 1969 and 1972, Apollo brought back 840 pounds of lunar samples.

Carnegie Science’s continued involvement in analyzing these materials led to groundbreaking discoveries, such as the 1969 discovery of the mineral"Armalcolite" made by then Carnegie postdoc Stephen Haggerty, the late Eric Hauri’s discovery of water content in lunar magmas in 2008, and Director Emeritus Richard Carlson’s use of isotopic dating to establish a revised, younger age for the Moon in 2013. These discoveries transformed our understanding of the lunar landscape and the early history of the Solar System.

Today, Carnegie researchers continue to play an essential role in studying samples from the near-Earth asteroids Ryugu and Bennu—returned by JAXA’s Hayabusa II and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx missions, respectively.

In August 2021, Larry Nittler, a former Carnegie cosmochemist, now a professor at Arizona State University, received samples of Ryugu at the Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory (EPL) in Washington, D.C. Nittler was one of only nine U.S. scientists selected by NASA to be a “participating scientist” on the mission. Carnegie researchers Richard Carlson, George Cody, Conel Alexander, and former postdoctoral fellow Jens Barosch, were also involved in teams analzying the samples for isotopic composition, organic material, and presolar grains.

While still at Carnegie Science, Nittler and Barosch made an exciting discovery within the Ryugu samples: the presence of presolar grains—ancient microscopic specks of dust that predate our Sun. These grains provide a glimpse into our Solar System’s starting materials, and their presence can serve as a chronological marker aiding in constructing a more accurate timeline of the Solar System’s history.

Similarly, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned samples of the asteroid Bennu to Earth in September 2023, and Carnegie scientists were among the first to receive them.

Thanks to our world-class instrumentation and our reputation for efficiency, NASA rushed the samples to EPL for a preliminary analysis of their carbon content, among other features. The team, which included Alexander, Cody, and Research Scientist Dionysis Foustoukos, thrilled the scientific community with their first carbon measurements—showing the highest abundance of carbon ever measured in an extraterrestrial sample.

This early analysis confirms the exceptional nature of the Bennu samples and underscores Carnegie’s legacy of excellence when it comes to the chemical analysis of space samples.

These investigations are just the start. As we continue to study samples from Ryugu and Bennu, we stand on the brink of a new golden age of sample return. The coming decade holds promises of missions to the metallic asteroid Psyche, Mars’ moon Phobos, Earth’s Moon, and more.

Among the most anticipated and perhaps most ambitious, are potential plans to return samples from Mars in the next decade. Carnegie astrobiologist and remote Raman spectroscopy expert Andrew Steele is a member of the Mars Sample Return Campaign Science Group, which aims to bring back samples collected by the Perseverance rover, offering unprecedented insights into Mars’s geology, climate history, and potential for past life. As we stand at the threshold of this new era, Carnegie Science remains at the forefront of unraveling the mysteries of our Solar System. With a history of groundbreaking contributions and a future filled with promise, Carnegie scientists continue to illuminate the pathways through which our universe has shaped the conditions for life.