Secrets of Asteroid Bennu with Harold Connolly Jr.

Summary

StarTalk Radio — "Secrets of Asteroid Bennu" with Harold Connolly Jr.

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Co-host: Chuck Nice
Guest: Dr. Harold Connolly Jr. (Founding Chair & Professor, Rowan University; Mission Sample Scientist, OSIRIS-REx)
Date: April 14, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this richly engaging episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice dive deep into the essence and mysteries of Asteroid Bennu, joined by planetary geologist Dr. Harold Connolly Jr. The trio explores Bennu’s role as a "time capsule" for the early solar system, highlights the incredible scientific journey of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, and unpacks how asteroid samples may illuminate origins of life in the universe. The conversation stitches together geologic, chemical, and biological insights with humor, science, and a dash of existential concern about possible future impacts with Earth.

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Main Themes

• Why sample asteroids like Bennu?
• The story of the OSIRIS-REx mission & sample return
• Analysis breakthroughs: organic compounds, volatiles, and salts
• What pristine samples tell us about the building blocks of life
• The complex interplay between geology, biology, astronomy, and planetary defense

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Go to Bennu?

• Motivation for Asteroid Sampling
  Instead of relying solely on meteorites found on Earth (often contaminated), scientists wanted pristine samples:

  “Meteorites as they fall to Earth are contaminated incredibly quickly... So the idea [was] to bring back a sample of pristine material, keep it in a nitrogen environment and analyze it.” — Harold Connolly Jr. (09:08)

• Bennu as a Target
  Chosen because it’s a carbonaceous asteroid (rich in potential life ingredients) and accessible due to its near-Earth orbit:

  “100%. Our scientific goals were to get to an asteroid...that was carbonaceous because we needed to look for what we already know is contained with the asteroids—volatiles, organics, etc.” — Connolly (12:25)

2. OSIRIS-REx Mission: Touch-and-Go Engineering (14:03)

• OSIRIS-REx was a “touch and go” sample mission. The probe essentially “punched” Bennu’s surface, collected regolith, and sent a return capsule back to Earth, landing precisely in the Utah desert.
• The unpredictably loose, “rubble pile” structure of Bennu surprised scientists:

  “We got there, we screamed because there were boulders 11 stories high...It wasn’t quite what we expected.” — Connolly (19:52)

• Ended up retrieving 122 grams of sample—double the minimum needed for major science goals (18:46).

3. Science from the Sample: What’s Inside? (23:30 – 32:24)

• Initial Handling: Ultra-clean nitrogen gloveboxes to minimize contamination.

• Analysis Techniques: Visual, optical, and electron microscopes; chemical dissolution for organics; always with attention to original geologic context.

• Salts & Evaporite Minerals
  Discovery of salt (including table salt analogs), signifying past liquid water and possible prebiotic conditions:

  "A classic example, table salt. Table salt is in the rocks from Bennu, it’s in the rocks from Ryugu." — Connolly (26:54)

• Amino Acids & Organic Molecules
  Found 14–15 amino acids (the building blocks of life) in pristine samples:

  “The main headline is 14 of the 20 amino acids that are needed for life.” — Connolly (31:26)
  “The 15th one was tryptophan...the same stuff you get in turkeys that makes you sleepy.” (32:21)

• Presolar Grains
  Identified “pre-solar” grains (older than the Solar System itself, like nanodiamonds and carbides), giving insight into material predating Sun and planets (46:15–48:52).

4. The Bigger Picture: How Earth Got Its Ingredients (58:03 – 64:32)

• Lithopanspermia Debate
  How meteorites and asteroids may have "seeded" Earth (and Mars) with prebiotic compounds:

  “The asteroids themselves could be seeding Mars and Earth with the prebiotic compounds that are needed for life to evolve.” — Connolly (58:03)

• Discussion on whether ingredients for life are easily formed from “geologic processes” everywhere or if they needed special delivery.

• Meteorite Contamination
  Importance of pristine (non-Earth-contaminated) samples for origin-of-life research:

  “Meteorites are definitely contaminated. So we’re learning a lot about organic chemistry in the Solar System from the asteroid samples that the meteorites are definitely contaminated.” — Connolly (57:06)

5. Bennu’s Impact Threat (67:10–69:49)

• Clarifies “1 in 2700” chance of impact in 2182—plenty of time for mitigation:

  “Given our orbital uncertainties, there’s a chance it could hit Earth in 2182...We want to keep an eye on these.” — Tyson (67:40)

6. Science as Collaboration; The New Golden Era (71:11–73:36)

• Dr. Connolly reflects on the convergence of geology, biology, and astronomy:

  “The universe doesn’t care about how we divide our sciences. The universe is just the universe.” — Tyson (72:06) “Because of these sample return missions...we’re at an exciting time. Understanding how planets form, the baseline geology, the physics, working with astronomers, remote sensors, and biologists to put our hypotheses together in a big-picture scope.” — Connolly (71:11)

• Global science: NASA archives & distributes samples, international collaboration, cross-verification of research.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On meteorite contamination:
  “Imagine, you’re sitting around for 4.5 billion years...nothing to do, nobody to bother you, except occasional collision and the Sun hitting you. Then you land on Earth, and within a day you’re contaminated.” — Connolly (08:49)
• On Bennu’s structure:
  “We got there, we screamed...there were boulders 11 stories high.” — Connolly (19:52)
• On OSIRIS-REx’s sampling surprise:
  “We went in 48 centimeters...almost down into the surface. Which we did not really expect.” (21:11)
• On amino acid detection:
  “The 15th one was tryptophan...the same stuff that’s in turkey that makes you sleepy.” — Connolly (32:21), with Chuck quipping, “That’s why Bennu rotates so slowly.”
• On panspermia and planetary defense:
  “If you can make amino acids on rocks in space...you can make amino acids on Earth without the rock.” — Tyson (62:37)
• On collaboration:
  “The universe doesn’t care about how we have divided our sciences...” — Tyson (72:06)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic | |---------------|-----------| | 01:56 | Ingredients for life in the universe, asteroids as time capsules | | 03:51 | OSIRIS-REx acronym, mission introduction | | 05:03 | Why sample asteroids? Contamination issues | | 08:49 | Meteorite contamination on Earth | | 12:25 | Why Bennu was selected—accessibility & composition | | 19:52 | Bennu's "rubble pile," sampling challenges | | 22:19 | Touch-and-go collection, unexpected regolith properties | | 23:51 | Lab protocols for sample analysis | | 26:21 | Salt/evaporites as evidence for ancient water | | 31:26 | Discovery of amino acids in Bennu’s sample | | 46:15 | Pre-solar grains—what they are and why they matter | | 58:03 | Lithopanspermia and Earth's early ingredients | | 67:10 | Bennu’s orbital hazard; probability of Earth impact | | 71:11 | Reflections on multidisciplinary collaboration in science |

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Science, Humor & Final Thoughts

• Chuck Nice’s comedic interjections kept the tone light even as they discussed “the coolest game of billiards ever” (planet formation) (42:34), and the nonchalance about an asteroid possibly hitting Earth long after any of them are around (67:36).
• Harold Connolly’s deep knowledge of planetary geology, coupled with thoughtful humility (“I’m not a biologist, so keep that in mind” (45:05)), made even complex ideas accessible.
• Neil deGrasse Tyson tied together threads from chemistry, biology, and planetary science, consistently pressing for answers that connect cosmic to everyday scale.

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Further Resources

• Follow-up:
  Dr. Harold Connolly Jr’s website for news and publications: haroldconnelly.wordpress.com (75:22)
• Sample Request and Science:
  Researchers can apply to NASA/Johnson Space Center for sample access after the exclusive period. International sharing with JAXA sample teams.
• Stay Current:
  NASA’s official OSIRIS-REx mission pages and Dr. Connolly’s website.

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Concluding Message

This episode revels in science’s collaborative spirit, the thrill of discovery in asteroid Bennu’s ancient powder, and the persistent humility (and humor) required when asking profound questions about life's origins and Earth's cosmic vulnerability—all of it summed up in StarTalk’s signature style:

“Keep looking up.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson

---

End of summary.

Transcript

[A]

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[A]

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[C]

Look, we're long overdue for devoting a show to Asteroid Bennu. Not only have it been there, it has Earth in its sights as a near earth asteroid that might hit us in 200 years.

[B]

As a matter of fact, gonna talk to Harold Connolly Jr. And if you wanna find out exactly when the Earth is going to be destroyed, just stay tuned down to the hour.

[C]

Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop cult startalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, Chuck Nice is with me in the house. Chuck, how you doing, man?

[B]

I'm good. I'm in my house.

[C]

In the house, remotely. How you doing, man?

[B]

I am doing great.

[C]

You know what we're gonna do today? Something I think we're long should have done long ago. We're gonna take a look at the ingredients for life as they exist in the rest of the universe. And how some of those ingredients may have influenced what happened on the early Earth. Nice. Yes, yes. And we have. We have a record of what the early solar system was like, and it's contained within our comets and asteroids. They've just been orbiting the sun since like day one. And they haven't been absorbed into a volcano, they haven't been rained on, they haven't been peed on by any animals. And so there's a pristine.

[B]

I've never considered that as a. I know, right?

[C]

That could totally be obstacle for finding our origins. Well, you know, we would have found

[B]

out, guys, but unfortunately. Do you see how much deer pee is on this?

[C]

So we have One of the world's experts in this in Harold Connolly, Junior. Harold Connolly. Welcome to StarTalk.

[D]

Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a great pleasure and honor to be here.

[C]

Excellent. Your founding chair. I love those. Chair and professor in the Department of Geology in Rowan University and Co Investigator. COI is the abbreviation of that. And Mission Sample Scientist for the Osiris Rex Mission. Ooh, that's big stuff. I know. So, first of all, we have to give the test you have to give everybody. Principal Investigator. Okay, please tell us what OSIRIS stands for, because it's an acronym.

[D]

Okay, but I'm not the PI, Just Mission Sample Scientist.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Just the guy that analyzed the sample returns.

[D]

That conducts 260 people around the world, but yeah. So Osiris rex is. Is NASA's New Frontiers 3 asteroid sample return Mission. And it stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation. See, now my brain is fried because I'm laughing so much.

[C]

I told you, it messes with us, these tortured acronyms.

[D]

Origin. Spectral Interpretation. I think I know. It's Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security and Regolith Explorer.

[B]

Oh, okay. Wow, that's good.

[C]

That's very tortured right there. Well, that's. No, I'll help NASA next time they need an acronym.

[D]

Origin. Yeah, right. But origins is easy. Right?

[B]

Right.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, we got that. So the thing is, we know that asteroids have hit Earth before, and we call them meteors coming through the atmosphere. Meteorite when you pick it up. And so we have quite a large catalog of space rocks on Earth. So what is your motivation for going to an asteroid that's out there in space?

[D]

That's a great question. A couple of motivations. And they're fit into that strange acronym we just discussed. And there's one particular branch of meteorites which I'm just going to show you both right here, because I'm holding up my hand. Which is known as carbonaceous chondrite. There are several different kinds of meteorites we have on Earth, and these are really old. This is what gives us the age of the solar system at 4.567 billion years old.

[C]

Wait, you're putting your grubby hands on a meteorite?

[B]

Listen, Neil, if it made it this far, if it made it up to 4.7 billion years, I don't think Harold's fingerprints are going to screw it up.

[C]

My boy just finished eating Buffalo wings and he's licking his fingers touching this hunk of coal.

[D]

Okay, we'll get back to that, but. That's a great point, but this one comes from sub Saharan Africa. So it's probably had camel dung learned at some time. Follow our analysis, our analog earlier. Anyway. So, yeah, the key is we don't know exactly what meteorites come from what asteroids. We have some spectral identification, meaning we look at different wave links of light or we identify asteroids. And we want to be able to understand the geologic context of these meteorites because any rock the geologist has, you can only tell so much about the story without putting it into the chorus that it's been singing in, to know what is the larger picture. Furthermore, these carbonaceous chondrites are full of what we call volatiles. They have water in them, they have minerals that require water to form. They have organic compounds in them, the prebiotic compounds that we need in order for life to have developed. And those are some of the key issues, including, as we said, security, which is we don't understand exactly how asteroids move very well because we make these predictions about how they're going to possibly hit the Earth in the end of the 22nd century. And we have what we call a probability. But that probability also needs to know what's the composition of the asteroid in order to predict. Well.

[C]

Oh, well, let's back up for a second. The geologist. First, let me celebrate the fact that geologists are now holding hands with astronomers, astrophysicists to explore the rest of the universe, because we're trained to look up and we're not trained to understand rocks that might be at our destinations. And so we tag team with eugeologists to help us interpret what's out there. But you use the word volatile in a way that the general public does not. To us, if something's volatile, it's like ready to explode.

[B]

Unstable.

[D]

Ah, very good point.

[C]

Yeah. Tell me what you mean by volatile that a rock would have volatiles.

[D]

Yeah, so when we talk about rocks that have volatiles and we're talking about the kinds of compounds that would quickly evaporate when you raise the temperature of the rock from, from basically background temperature. Oh, yes, so. So water, for example, you know, everybody knows water will boil, you know, at, at 100 degrees C or 212 Fahrenheit. So you know that that's something that these rocks contain. And that water is 4.567 roughly billion years old and was moving around the actual original body that what we call the parent body of the asteroids that we see now. What we see now are basically bits and pieces of what was once much larger bodies that were internally geologically active.

[B]

Interesting.

[D]

Wow.

[C]

Okay, okay, so this so It's a time machine for you, definitely.

[D]

Time capsule. Time capsule, that's right. Capsule.

[C]

Better word. Yeah.

[D]

And going back to your analogy of the dog pee, many of these, in fact, they get contaminated, the meteorites, as they fall to Earth very, very quickly. So within a day or two, you've already contaminated. You're interacting with the atmosphere, little microbes start to eat them. I mean, imagine you're sitting around for four and a half billion years, as Neil said, and you've got nothing to do, nobody to bother you, really, except occasional collision and the sun hitting you. So the other idea is to bring back. Was to bring back a sample of pristine material, keep it in a nitrogen environment and analyze it. And that turns out to be, as we'll see, absolutely critical to what we have been finding in both asteroid Rugu sample and of course, asteroid Bennu sample.

[B]

So let me start some trouble. Yeah, what. What will we find more from. Because a comet has the water, it's ice. Right. So would you. What, what would we benefit more from a sample collection of an actual asteroid, which we've done. That's what you guys did. Or being able to kind of either trail and capture or capture a piece of a comet which has, you know, which will give you the water?

[D]

Well, that's a great question. And capturing the water and bringing it back to Earth is incredibly tricky. We have. We have sampled from the back of comets in a coma and brought back the minerals that were actually in that common material, but not the ices. To actually freeze a sample and bring it back is really complicated and really expensive, most likely.

[C]

So you say it's hard to bring back. It's hard to bring back the volatiles is the point here.

[D]

It's hard to bring back the volatiles and the ices and stuff because you got to keep them cold the whole time and keep the cold coming through the atmosphere and then not interact with the Earth too much. Actually, this brings. Stop me if you want, but this brings sort of a square root of one question is that the Osiris Rex mission is a special class of missions, which is a sample return mission, of which, if we don't include the Cold War, Apollo and Luna samples, we've only had a couple of handfuls of those in the course of history. Basically three of them by the US Two by Japan, and two by China. So you're looking at basically a large sack of potatoes of extraterrestrial material that was brought back to Earth roughly 8 pounds or so of material that was a little over $2 billion worth of money spent to get these samples back. For scientific community that conservatively probably only 100, maybe, well, say maybe 1500 people in the world work full time at trying to understand.

[C]

I don't have a problem with that.

[D]

I don't. Last year an American people spent $4 billion on candy for Halloween.

[C]

So,

[D]

you know, here we're pushing the frontiers of our origins.

[C]

Understanding where we the dentists need you to spend that much on candy.

[D]

Okay, I have to get a crown tomorrow. I have to get a crown tomorrow before I to England for three months. Thank you.

[C]

I know. So let's back up again. Of all the asteroids that orbit the sun, most of course are in the asteroid belt. Those are harder to get to, I guess because a whole bunch of them cross Earth's orbit. So one of them you picked, I happen to know Bennu crosses Earth's orbit. So does that. Is that what makes it a little more attractive because of how accessible it is?

[D]

100%. 100%. Our scientific goals were to get to an asteroid. Well, our goals were to get to an asteroid that we could get to safely and come home. And that was within some kind of cost cap or was it cost prohibited? And that asteroid we determined to meet our scientific goals has to be a carbonaceous asteroid. Because we needed to look for what we know already is contained within the asteroids. Fragments, meteorites, scorching of life, volatiles, et cetera.

[C]

Just to contrast that with what many people stereotype as an asteroid, A metallic asteroid. And here at the American Museum of Natural History, our two biggest asteroids are iron and nickel. And they're huge, some of the biggest out there. And so many people, when they just come to a museum, it's the metal ones that get all the attention. Because the other ones just kind of look like rocks, frankly.

[D]

Because they are.

[C]

Is that why they look like rocks? So it seemed to me that it would be harder to sample return from a metallic asteroid. Because you can't sort of pick up dirt on its surface. Is that a true fact?

[D]

I think that's right, Neil. Yeah. We have a mission. NASA has a mission going to study asteroid Psyche, which is supposed to be an iron nickel asteroid, but it's not bringing sample back. It would be a lot harder to drill and actually get a piece of metal out of the asteroid, bring it back.

[C]

Just Bruce Willis could take care of that, no problem. Okay, so we go to this asteroid. If I remember correctly, this mission was a touch and go, right?

[D]

Perfect.

[C]

Yep, it was, yeah. And so it comes down, punches up some material Captures it in a capsule. When I rethink what this mission did. I'm just saying, as a matter of fact, it is rocket science. Right? So you launch Osiris Rex from a moving platform Earth to intersect a moving target. Bennu, you do a touch and go grab material, come back to Earth, deploy the capsule onto a rotating Earth so that it lands where?

[D]

Utah Desert.

[C]

In Utah.

[B]

Okay. As well as should.

[D]

And a gentle plop. Nothing else.

[C]

Right, right, right. So of all on the rotating Earth, all this has got to work out. And then that's when my worst nightmares begin. Because one of the earliest novels I ever read in my life was Michael Crichton's the Andromeda Strain, where they brought back. Where they brought back a. Basically a sample return from. I don't remember where, just from space. And it had a bug that started killing people. And so let me ask you. Tell me about NASA's protection protocols for this.

[D]

Yeah, that's a great question. So the asteroids are considered non hazardous with respect to any sort of biological threat. They've been sitting in space or four and a half years, billion years, and been cooked by the sun's radiation and cosmic rays in the background on the surface, and are deemed not hazardous with respect to any kind of biological issues. Right. So planetary bodies like Mars, that's a whole different issue and requires a whole different set of responsibilities and care that have to be taken if you want to bring sample back from there.

[C]

So the pictures I saw with people analyzing, maybe your hands were among those inside that. That sealed cavity where the dust from the capsule was getting analyzed. That was really just to prevent sample contamination, not to prevent you from getting some kind of bug.

[D]

Right.

[B]

Being contaminated by some kind of alien. Now with that, Harold, have you had any compulsions since you've handled this material that you have not understood?

[D]

As a matter of fact, yes. I drink less gin than I used to.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[C]

All right.

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

I'm Alicon Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[C]

How much meteorite material did we bring back?

[D]

Roughly 122 grams of material. And that's basically sounds like it's small, but it's basically a cup full of particles. But that cup full of particles is a lot, correct? A lot. It's a lot.

[B]

I was going to say, but now when you, when you make the collection, because it is a rock and I don't know a lot about rocks, but I know some rocks are harder than other rocks. And I also know from a conversation with Neil that some asteroids are kind of like pebbly because they're held together. They're not really a big solid rock. They're kind of pebbly and held together, you know, and it's easy to go in and do whatever you want to do. If we were talking about mining asteroids, if I recall the conversation.

[C]

So Chuck, very important point there. So Harold, what was your confidence in the structural integrity of Bennu to just come down and do a touch and go? Did you know enough about its structure to know that that would succeed in advance?

[D]

Yeah. Great questions from both of you. First of all, Bennu is what we call a rubble pile asteroid. So it's literally an asteroid made up of accumulation boulders and teeny tiny little grains. And it rotates around its own axis at. In 4.2 hours, actually rotates retrograde, which means opposite than what we normally would think it rotates. And all the information we had, we had designed originally the spacecraft for big, big ponds on the surface of really fine grained material. You know what we're talking about less than an inch size material because our data, our science showed us that there should be a lot of it. We got there, we screamed because There were boulders 11 stories high and it wasn't quite what we expected.

[C]

And you can't fit a boulder 11 stories high into your canister.

[D]

We can't, sorry, it's not that big.

[C]

We're gonna get a bigger boat.

[D]

And you know, the problem is when you fly down to the surface of the asteroid, you may not come back out the same way either. So there's challenges with the navigation that you have to think about and to, to get to your, your questions and your, your comments here. We had designed the touch and go sample acquisition mechanism to basically just touch the surface, as Neil said. And we fire some nitrogen gas and it basically fluidizes or moves the gravel up and then it gets collected into this little sort of reverse Hoover or vacuum head. And then we would pull back the, the, the autonomous spacecraft pulls back from the surface. But what happened was, is we want in 48 centimeters, you know, length of an arm, almost down into the surface of the asteroid, which wasn't, you know, went right through it. Blink. Which we did not really expect. Some folks on a mission will say, well we had some models that showed it could be, but yeah, okay, it could be. But that was a good thing actually because it taught us that gravity itself is basically what's holding the asteroid together. Tensile forces between particles is not really doing it very well. Hey Neil. See I learned some physics over the last 20 years. And the other thing is we're penetrating deeper into the surface. So the surface of the asteroid is being caught a lot depending on how much the surface is moving based on the rotation and landslides and impacts. So we're getting down to the stuff that might be fresher. Quote fresher.

[C]

So that's better for you, correct?

[D]

Absolutely correct.

[C]

Wow.

[D]

The problem was, and you did ask another question here when I get to that. The problem was that when we pulled back up, you know, and did the first test to see what kind of sample we got, we literally moved that 3 meter arm backwards to a camera to take pictures. And I can remember about 4 o' clock in the morning, waking up and downloading from our mainframe the images and start looking at it had all these little spots all over the place. I'm thinking, what the heck are these spots? Long story short, as the world knows, several stones got caught keeping the flap open. And this, that we were losing sample every time we articulated the arm.

[B]

Wow.

[D]

There's another PhD thesis there's another.

[B]

That's tough.

[D]

Yeah, Always. Right? Yeah, that was. So the PI had to make some quick decisions with the associate administrator of NASA and other people to basically stow the sample much quicker than we had expected to prevent more from loss. But of course, as you know, we got 122 grams of sample 121.6, and we needed to get 60 grams to meet our scientific goals. Success.

[C]

That's a success. Yeah. So you bring it back to Earth, and now you've got it in the lab. And so you're a geologist. I don't know. Do you guys use microscopes or do you use stuff that dissolves the material? And you do mass spectrometer. What's a geologist's dream lab when you have something from space?

[D]

That's a great question. We brought the sample out of the field, by the way. The sample canister, the SRC sample return capsule landed in the Utah desert basically perfectly in the end. It had rained there three days earlier, but it chose to land in a dry spot, which was perfect. And then we take it to a makeshift facility at the UTTR Utah test and training range. We. We get the sample canister and it's, you know, the guts of the sample return capsule out and get it under nitrogen so that the sample is constantly bathed in nitrogen. So, I mean, that took literally almost four hours to the mark to get that under the. Perfect timing.

[C]

We have a quick chemistry question. You speak of nitrogen as though it's neutral. And in fact, there's some sort of wine air replacement canisters that send nitrogen in as the air comes out. But to me, nitrogen can make ammonia, you know, nitrous oxide. It's not like argon, where we're taught in chemistry class is just inert because it's got no electrons available.

[B]

Just nothing to do, no interaction.

[C]

So why does nitrogen work for you? I just never understood that chemically.

[D]

In this case, we have the samples of the nitrogen, so we know what the composition of the nitrogen is. Not just nitrogen, but it's isotope composition, if there's any impurities in it, which of course, there's not. And it doesn't react with normal minerals and rocks in any way, shape, or form.

[C]

Okay. Okay.

[D]

I shouldn't say normal. I shouldn't say normal. There's nothing normal about typical.

[C]

Right.

[D]

Sample typical. And then we get to the. I'll just tell you real quick. Then we get to the lab, we open up the canister, and the first thing you do as a geologist is you look at it with Your eye. The most important thing is that it's a rock. Before you begin to slice it up to make polished sections, before you send it off to the, to the folks at Goddard Space Flight center to analyze organics before they dissolve it up to get their analysis, you must know what the rock is, because the context is absolutely critical. Without the context of the rock, you may not be able to interpret your results.

[C]

So different labs had different objectives in the samples that they were given?

[D]

Correct.

[C]

Okay. Is it possible that your priors, I don't mean to get philosophical on you, but is it possible that your prior expectations for what the sample is can bias your conclusions, that you draw from it 100%?

[D]

If I may. We had an amazing aha moment when we discovered, which we should have more or less known we were going to discover. But because we find so few of these minerals in meteorites that we pick up on Earth, it didn't kind of process that the asteroid samples could be rich in evaporite minerals. What is an evaporite mineral? A mineral that forms in a water rich solution as that water evaporates. A classic example, table salt.

[C]

Right?

[B]

Absolutely.

[D]

Table salt is in the rocks from Bennu, it's in the rocks from Rugu.

[C]

And the point is, so is the Utah salt flats, and it landed in Utah.

[D]

We have samples to prove it's not from there.

[C]

I'm just saying you land in Utah and you say we found salts. Just to alert our listeners and viewers, when a geologist analyzes a sample, in most cases the sample is destroyed when you're done. Isn't that correct?

[D]

Well, yes and no, actually, because I'm the kind of geologist that's called a petrologist, and my job is to tell the stories that the rock contained. And that means looking at them with my eye, looking at them with a microscope, as Neil said, and then actually cutting them and polishing them and looking out at them with a special microscope, either one that's optical, that sees through to the thin, thin, thick, thin coatings of the rock on a, basically a glass slide, or put them in an electron microscope or scanning electron microscope, where then you begin to analyze in detail their composition of the minerals and how the rocks, minerals arrange themselves and why they're the way they are. All these little details. It's like being a, a detective. The tiniest little clue may actually open up a whole world of being able to understand geology. Now other folks, other scientists do dissolve sample, but if you dissolve the sample without knowing what you dissolved, other than it came from this mountain, I Mean, you know, how many different layers of rock are in the mountain and you say it came from that mountain? Well, I don't know where it came from. That doesn't help. You recreate the geology and then put it into context of a special question, such as, you know, looking at the potential origins of what we know is life.

[C]

So I don't mean to diss your entire profession, but most people, when we look out into, into space rocks, we're kind of interested in the organics, not in the minerals. And I know geologists love them, some minerals, but at the end of the day, the headline is not what kind of new rock you found, it's what kind of organics might be there. So how close were you to that analysis? Or was that a whole other group?

[D]

So that's a very good point you raise. And the problem with the organic chemistry, Not a problem, but the challenge is that you have to know what the rock is that you're analyzing. What processes, geologic processes, has it been through in order to know the geologic processes that that rock has been to. In this case, an apparent body that was probably the size of Ceres, the asteroid Ceres, for example. That fluid moved through that asteroid four and a half billion years ago. Because the asteroid became active when the asteroid accreted rock in the earliest time period, it created ices, not just water ice, but ammonia, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, et cetera. And then the asteroid internally began to heat up and you have fluid moving through. Now why is that any relevance whatsoever to prebiotic compounds? Because prebiotic compounds may very well have formed in that aqueous or water rich environment. The evaporite minerals that we talked about are the late stage product of the fluid that moved through, that formed other minerals first, and they're the very last stage. Now, if you're an organic chemist and you want to get organics to come out of a solution, one of the time classic methods of doing that in a laboratory is you salt the solution and the organics go with the evaporated minerals or the salt when you evaporate the fluid.

[C]

I gotta correct you on something. You called Ceres an asteroid, but it got promoted to dwarf dwarf planet.

[D]

You're right. I'm sorry to get with the program here. I'm sorry, I'm behind 30 years. Right.

[C]

Just remind people it's the only asteroid that's large enough for its gravity to shaped it into a sphere. And that's sufficient qualifications to be a dwarf planet, just like Pluto.

[B]

Yeah. By the way, Pluto sends its regards and Says F you.

[C]

Thank you Chuck for that plural Pluto plural for that telegram. So what do we know? I seem to remember a research paper or it might have just been a review in the New York Times that talked about was it amino acids that were found in the rock?

[D]

We found a lot in the rock and we're finding more. And they also found a lot of organic compounds because we're talking about organic compounds and the minerals associated with them in the Rugu sample. The difference is that in Hayabusa 2, which was a Jackson mission to asteroid Ryugu, that brought back sample, they brought back 5.2 grams, so they have a lot less. So for us we were able to do work for organics on individual stones from Bennu and also homogenized powder of more than 6 grams that we homogenized up to really understand the chemistry well. And indeed they have found that the main headlines is 14 of the 20amino acids that are needed for life. But really it's probably 15 because a paper by Mahara et al that came out in November found the 15th one and we have to reproduce it. But that was right near Thanksgiving. And the 15th one was tryptophan, which is the same stuff that you're getting turkeys that make you sleepy, right?

[B]

That's why Benoist rotates so slowly.

[C]

Thank you Chuck for that scientific analysis. What is the paper coming out on that. I forgot that tryptophan is an amino acid. I've forgotten that. And the famous one from Jurassic park is of course, what is it? Lysine.

[B]

Lysine.

[C]

Lysine wanted to make sure that the dinosaurs were dependent on that and therefore they would die had they escaped. But of course together now life finds a way. So Harold, I remember because I'm that old, back in the 90s when we analyzed ALH 84, 84, 001, something like that, this potato shaped meteorite on Earth which was deduced that it came from Mars and I thought it was brilliant. They found a little air inclusions within it and analyzed it had the exact atmospheric composition of Mars. So this rock came from Mars and there was no dispute about that. But it also had some inclusions within it that if memory serves, it had oxidized minerals sitting right adjacent to non oxidized minerals. And typically in any geologic environment that you have, it's either oxygen rich or not, right? And if it's oxygen rich then everything gets oxidized and if it's oxygen poor then nothing is oxidized. But life does both in the same vessel, right? We Inhale and oxidize our hemoglobin, and then the oxygen gets ripped away. Hemoglobin goes back for more oxygen. So we have oxidized and non oxidized molecules in the very same vessel. So the fact that they were together on the rock would require you to believe, if you're going to explain it abiotically, that the rock was like over here for a while and was getting oxygenated, and then it rolled somewhere else where there was no oxygen, and then it had some other participating molecules. You have to really Rube Goldberg your way into that answer.

[B]

Or it was breathing.

[C]

Or it had lungs.

[B]

My fault, my fault, my fault.

[C]

So with these inclusions at this new site on Mars, at the Chiava Falls site, if you find more than that, it might be really hard, if not impossible, to completely explain it abiotically. So do you know what else was discovered in those inclusions?

[D]

Yeah. So the report, and the report talked about basically the byproducts of breaking down fatty acids, if my memory serves me right, and alkenes and some single sort of chain organic molecules.

[C]

And we don't want any fatty rocks on Mars. We don't want any fatty rocks.

[D]

Oh, no, no.

[C]

We don't want them getting Pete headset. No fat, no fatty. We'll take some acid, but no fatty acids.

[D]

I think that's one of the other data points that they're using to. The scientists who wrote that paper are using to argue that there's additional evidence of potential biological processes that were around at that time, 80 million years ago, which is the Cretaceous period here on Earth. So here on Earth, dinosaurs would have been walking around at that same time period. And that's a lot younger than that. 84 Allen Hills. 84. Oh, and that rock is. Because that's about 4.1 or 2 billion years old, that rock. So the likelihood, at least more confidence can be given that that's a. That's a nicer way to construct a hypothesis. But again, we still have so much to learn about the formation of organic compounds in the relationship to geology and the rocks and to, you know, to go off too much and in one direction or the other, I think the middle path is required here.

[C]

Rygu, whose mission was that? One.

[D]

So JAXA, the Japanese space agency, has had two sample return missions. Hayabusa 1, which went to an asteroid called Itokawa and brought back tiny, teeny, tiny little grains because the collecting mechanism didn't quite work the way it was supposed to. But then Hayabusa 2, which went to the carbonaceous Asteroid Ryugu, which was actually Osiris Rex's backup plan in case we we couldn't figure out how to get to Bedu. And they chose Ryugu and went to Ryugu and came home basically earlier than we did. The analysis started in June of 2021 and I was living in Tokyo at that time period for the beginning of the analysis of their sample from asteroid Ruger. Now think about that. It was a pandemic.

[C]

Yeah, of course, of course. Isn't Wooboo the name of a Star wars character? I have some. It ought to be.

[D]

If it's not, that's a pretty cool name. Yeah.

[C]

So just to sort of celebrate the scientific profession, tell me what role the researcher Rigu played in your guys approach to Bennu. Because you know, one mission stands on the shoulders of the previous mission. That's how science works. So were you able to answer or ask different questions of your samples because of what was learned in the previous sample returns?

[D]

Yeah, it's both scientific, engineering and cultural. In the exchange we had co lives on each other's team, which means members of each other's teams. I was a member on both teams and Shogoteshibana from the University of Tokyo was a member on Osiris Rex as well as in charge of analysis sample for Hayabusa2 and indeed the early analysis of their sample, which they analyzed only 100 milligrams of. We had 15 grams to work with with ours and actually we, we were good boys and girls and didn't even get to 13 and managed to get our goals achieved. And they informed us on what the chemistry we should expect, what the minerals are we should expect, and how to take a deep dive into certain areas that turned out to be very important for findings as you just talked about.

[C]

Excellent. Now, is it true that every asteroid is the fragment of some larger parent body that got shattered early in the solar system? And I ask that because Bennu, last I checked, is bigger than the Empire State building, something like 500 meters across. And so that seems like a big enough body to be its own body in the universe. But tell me, turn the clock back on this. Was there some protoplanet that had already sort of, as you the geologists say, differentiated its materials and then shattered to become Bennu? And if that's the case, you might be able to find other rocks that are like Bennu that are out there?

[D]

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. First of all, the main type of meteorite we find on Earth that's like Bennu is called a C meteorite and there's only two handfuls of them in existence. And it's very clear from both studying the sample from Ryugu and a sample from Bennu that our sample collection is biased on Earth, not only is the sample collection contaminated, but what actually is out in space is biased because we have a lot of carbonaceous asteroids. Now turn the clock backward. Bennu is fragments from collisions that occurred of different bodies together. One of those bodies was a parent body, as we call a previous incarnation of Bennu, at a much larger scale. And that was something that was indeed forming probably some of the early proto planets that may have existed. And once the objects get to a certain size, around 10 km or so in diameter, the internal mechanism begins to turn on for geologic process. That internal mechanism is heat begins to move around. That's generated from the decay of radioactivity and pressure.

[C]

It becomes a cosmic body at that level.

[D]

Becomes a cosmic body. It begins to melt the ices that were accreted with it. It begins to have fluid. And we call that the early stages of metamorphism in geology and the early stages of metamorphosis. That fluid moves through and begins to interact with the minerals that are there. And it begins to change those minerals and pick up different kinds of chemicals as it's moving through the fluid. It moves in different parts of the asteroid because it cracks the all kinds of things that happen. And then what we think happened is that at some point, the poor parent body asteroid gets collided into with something else and it stops the process. So you have a snapshot in geologic time of that moment that all the processes geologically were active

[C]

because it's not big enough to sustain it anymore. And it gets frozen in that.

[D]

It got knocked up. It got knocked up and, you know, banged around and, you know, that's it. So, you know.

[C]

Yeah. So because it's relatively recent, well, recent in my professional life, last several decades, that we came to learn that star systems, we take the solar system for example, with its eight planets, If you run the models, that star systems such as ours likely began with like 30 planets or something or planetesimals. And many of those orbits are just unstable and they collide with each other and it gets resolved. And so it takes a while for that to sort of shake out and find out who's left.

[B]

You just described the coolest game of billiards ever. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Who survives survivor billiards? And don't you even have. There's some action asteroids where there looked like there were two pieces that are stuck together that didn't break apart.

[D]

Well, yeah, they're also asteroids that have satellites that go around from collisions, most likely, so.

[C]

Right, right.

[D]

Even in asteroid Bennu, although we don't have a satellite, didn't find a satellite. It was geologically active on the surface. And we had these explosions that push material up, which was not commentary like, but we had looked, going back to the comment discussion, we had looked for commentary action because one of the hypotheses for Bennu before we got there was it could have been an think comet core, but it isn't. At least most of us will say it is.

[C]

Right. It's not a clean boundary between asteroids and comets. Right.

[D]

Oh, sir, no, sir, it is not. You know that better now. Yep. It is not.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So now when we think of life, you know, I think of we're carbon based. That's, you know, everybody knows that. And we, we eat food and we have crops and we eat plants and animals and every we. I always see phosphorus showing up as some key ingredient. And not being a biologist, I've never fully come to appreciate what role that plays. So could you just tell me about phosphorus? I know it's an element on the periodic table. And did you find it in this asteroid sample? And what role does it play in sustaining life as we know it?

[D]

Right, so let's go back to again. The square root of one and that phosphorus is of course one of them elements on a periodic table, as you said, and the accretion time period of the asteroid, you have all this material creating which contains all the different elements that we have on our table to some extent, not things like hydrogen and helium and stuff. Then as time goes on, minerals start to form through the interaction of water with these rocks that we talked about. And that water is moving through with different, what I call nutrients. In this case, it's not for biological system, but geologic system. And things like sodium, like in sodium chloride, table salt and chlorine and phosphorus are in this fluid.

[C]

And then I love that reference to geologic nutrients. That's a cool, that's a cool thought.

[D]

To me, they were alive at one time.

[B]

I get.

[C]

Okay, you know to you, rocks are alive. That's fine, don't worry.

[B]

Give it time. Some influencers on the social media will be be pushing geologic nutrients for your health at some point.

[D]

Oh, yes, life was hard when I was in high school. Let me just say that I was a geek anyway. Yeah, so we, so there's a whole sequence that forms of these different minerals, the calcium rich ones Then the phosphorus rich ones, right, and they go down through what's left in the fluid to come out of the fluid and start forming new minerals. Do you get things like sodium, etc. And phosphorus is one of those key minerals that makes things like phosphates. And of course, phosphorus is one of the key kind of elements that gets bound together with things like carbon and hydrogen, et cetera, to form prebiotic compounds that are important. And it's the whole suite o of these evaporite minerals, not just the phosphate. The phosphorus is critical though, but it's, it's not just that. It's a whole suite in them that we as life have to have in different ways and different proportions. Now, I'm not a biologist, so keep that in mind.

[C]

Yeah. So tell me about pre solar grains. There's a lot of research papers on this. In fact, we have some on display here at the Rhodes center for earthen sprays. In fact, they're pre solar diamonds, I think. And there's some, some. There's some. And I think it's kind of cool. I just don't know its relevance. It's cool to think of grains that might have predated the formation of the solar system, which gets you even farther back than the four and a half billion years. So I think that's kind of cool. But is it just sort of cool to know or does it have other relevance to any of this?

[D]

Well, I mean, you know, you know, they're saying better than I, you know, we are stardust. We are made up of stardust, right? And stardust dust means dust that literally comes from stars, either evolving stars or dying stars that eject material. And in that ejection, a gas that comes out like the fluid with minerals condensing. These new minerals condense out of the gas. And these are from stars that are not part of our, were not part of our solar system and seed it. What was there in the beginning before our solar system formed, which was a molecular cloud. And there are different kinds of pre solar grains. The diamonds are one of them. Yeah. Downstairs in the museums meteorite hall, there are diamonds and a little capsule in there which is fantastic. It looks like a slip, you know, like a grayish mixture inside of a little vial. There are silicon carbine grains, but then there are what we call corundon or little teeny tiny. And we're talking really so small, smaller than what, you know, we can see, certainly with the naked eye, nanometer size.

[C]

Isn't some of these that you're describing used as fake Diamonds on Earth or corundum, I have some memory as ruby

[D]

or sapphire is what that is.

[C]

Yeah, okay. All right.

[D]

And then there are silicates. Silicates being the most abundant minerals that we see on earth. Like quartz is a silicate mineral, for example olivine or peridot, the gemstone peridote is another one. So these grains predate the origin of the solar system and they provided the nutrients, if you will, for the beginning of the formation of rocky materials and minerals in this solar system. Because everything got crunched as it, as the gas began to collapse to form the sun and things heated up and then they cooled down and stuff came out. But these grains survived that process. So they're actually older than our solar system, which is really, really cool. And there are people who spend their whole life studying these pre solar grains and it's incredible.

[B]

So the solar system was basically able to form because it was on a whole grain diet is what you're saying. I love it.

[D]

A whole grain diet, vegetarian, maybe even vegan.

[C]

I said didn't even seven grains there. I thought there was seven grains there.

[D]

And just one more point about the pre solar grains is that these, we find them in the mirror. That means I survived the geologic processes such as the water moving through or heat beginning to generate. And many of them survived at different degrees depending on where we're getting the sample from and what was the original parent. Wow.

[A]

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[B]

I checked Allstate first and saved hundreds on my car insurance. Really smart. Unfortunately I didn't check if I took the gas hose out of my car's tank. Oh, not smart. And I drove off while still attached to pump number three.

[A]

Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. Potential savings vary subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Company and affiliates, Northwick, Illinois.

[C]

So let's pivot to other places where these search for ingredients of life have been in the news, such as Mars Right. We're not quite there yet with Europa. We've got a nice Clipper mission en route. We have a whole episode of Start Talk where we toured the jet propulsion labs and spoke to the folks. It was right around the launch time of the Europa Clipper mission to look for life under the. With ice penetrating radar. To look under the ice, that icy moon with its ocean of liquid water. But if we go to Mars, where there's no water today but such ample evidence that there was once running water. Do you compare notes with the. Your fellow Mars geologist or Marsologists, whatever the word is you might call them, to see? Because I remember there's a recent news where there was some inclusions in some kind of clay or something that people felt pretty sure is a record of some kind of microbial life thriving in a distant past. And their inclusions that only a geologist would recognize as being something interesting. And then you pair that up with the biologists and the. All the astronomer can do is just watch you guys have a conversation about it.

[D]

Well, you can talk to us about it as you do. Yeah. But. Yeah, yeah, that's a great. I like the way you drew that. That's. That's so. From lessons learned from analyzing Bennu, for example, and Ryugu. And there's several more papers coming out in the near future from the Osiris Rex mission that are gonna detail even more interesting results about prebiotic compounds. So keep to the literature for that. Look for that very soon.

[C]

And just to be clear, for everyone in this modern era, it means a research paper with many collaborators that has been submitted for peer review has been revised according to whatever the peer review might have recommended. Then it shows up up in the journal online or otherwise, and that then gets disseminated around the world for others to comment on, to. To stand on the shoulders of what was there. That's what's going on here. He's not making a YouTube video.

[B]

Well, yeah, it's either that or he goes on Joe Rogan for two hours. Either the first or Rogan for two hours, which is the same, by the way.

[D]

So, yeah, so on in the area of Mars. What was it called? I forgot. Chiana Falls. Is that what it was? Yeah. Recently came out. The minerals that were there and large veins of what are probably a mineral called gypsum and associated minerals are minerals that form through a fluid precipitation. Evaporite minerals. They have to come out of this fluid that is there and the fluid's evaporating and other minerals that are there, such as vivianite which is a phosphate mineral. Here we go. Phosphorus again. One of the key ingredients for life

[C]

isn't gypsum on the Mohs scale. I have some memory of that. So I got that right.

[D]

You got that right. You got that right.

[C]

Gypsum is very soft. It's like one or two or three.

[D]

It's, it's a hydrated mineral, so it has water attached to it. That's what makes it structure. And then grigite is another mineral that form, and that's an iron sulfur rich mineral. But that is an interesting mineral because it's a. On a pathway to the final product forming would be pyrite, which everybody knows the schools go. The mineral before that is mechan. All right, big name. But that mineral was recently discovered in both Ryugu and Bennu for the first time. Now, why is this mineral rigite important? Because it' sampling different abundances of oxygen that is around the motive to produce itself.

[C]

Okay. Now, oxygen is not uncommon in the universe, but it's highly reactive, right? So it's going to be binding with almost everything. And so where's it getting its oxygen from? What's its source?

[D]

Oh, that's a great question. We assume it's coming from a fluid interaction, a fluid that has evolved. But how that fluid's evolving, I don't know. When that fluid evolved, I don't know. And the landscape certainly is such that, you know, fluid was moving around water

[C]

in the chava falls in that. Those deposits, I don't know. Is that the right word? Inclusions? Those.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, the sedimentary rods, deposits.

[C]

Are you convinced that there was an active biota in the, in the distant past from that evidence? Or is there another way to explain that that does not involve life? Because life would be extraordinary and fun. But, you know, you geologists have all kinds of ways you can make stuff even without life.

[D]

Oh, I know it. Yeah. So I'm not sure if life was actually part of that process, but I'm not going to eliminate it as a scientist from that process. It could be what we call abiotic or not requiring life. But it may be that life was there. There are other evidence to suggest that, and I don't know the details of the organic compounds. There's simple organic compounds that were also found there that may indicate that life was there. But as we know from working with Bennu, we're beginning to understand that the organic compounds that we're finding in Bennu are much greater than what we see in the meteorites. And the process which formed them most likely occurred inside of a great parent body or on surface or subsurface of Mars, for example, or Earth. And that is an important punctuation point that we have to know. Meteorites are definitely contaminated. So we're learning a lot about organic chemistry in the solar system in prebiotic chemistry from the meteorites, from the asteroid samples, that the meteorites are definitely contaminated.

[B]

If you look at that and you look at, let's say you find these evidences on Mars and then we already know that they're in the asteroids, is that I don't want to make a big leap. Would that be any indication that there is this so called lithopamspermia that seeds planets like ours to create life? Or would it mean that, hey man, this is just the stuff that shows up under the right conditions doesn't make a difference where you are?

[D]

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. The latter certainly more or less what we've kind of been leaning towards here and that the, the asteroids themselves could be seeding Mars and Earth with the prebiotic compounds that are needed for life to have evolved. But I'm old enough to know that we, we have meteorites from Mars on the surface of Earth. And I'm old enough to know that there was a time period when certain physicists said you couldn't get rocks off of Mars to Earth. And when we finally proved that these are essentially proved to a, you know, high level confidence that these are from Mars, the calculations showed that you can. So it's certainly not impossible. But I mean, why go there where we can go with a more simple answer, at least at first, to eliminate that.

[C]

So I found a fascinating concept. Let me just share it with you and tell me if you agree. So the biologist sees life on Earth and we don't see life elsewhere as thriving as it is on Earth. So it's easy to just come up with the singular genesis of life on Earth by whatever cause. And, and then you have to. And we know how complex the DNA molecule is. So we can ask ourselves, could that have happened on any other surface of any other planet? And we say, look how complex it is. No, it's unlikely. However, geologic processes, I can send you to any planet and you'll be familiar. There might be some fun, interesting things that you've only read about or heard about in abundance there. But geology, when you subject minerals and ingredients to the same temperatures, pressures will get you the same results every time. So if you create a biological analog to that and say, given the right temperatures and pressures and Time, you'll make a DNA molecule every time. What do you say to that? That maybe, you know, if geology is

[B]

it for geology, why wouldn't it do it for us?

[C]

Why wouldn't it do it for biology? Yeah, yeah.

[D]

The short answer is yes.

[C]

Oh, okay.

[B]

I'm glad we cleared that up.

[C]

But I have another. I have an issue with the panspermia hypothesis. Okay, okay. And by the way, that's an hypothesis surely named by men.

[B]

Oh, without a doubt.

[D]

100%.

[B]

Yeah, without a doubt.

[C]

Okay. So, yeah, life begins in one location and then spreads to other location. Which, by the way, I don't think we. Getting back to your ignorant physicist comment, I think no one knew how to do that until we can computer model major impacts on planetary surfaces that can then fling rocks back into space. And you couldn't just deduce that. You had to calculate what happens to the energy of the impactor and how it gets manifested. So in all fairness to the ignorant physicist, computers helped us out there. To the cocky physicist, okay.

[D]

It was by chance to have fun. Fun at you.

[C]

By the way, just further in your defense, one of our greatest physicists, Lord Kelvin of the Kelvin temperature scale, was telling geologists, geologists said, look, we need a billion years to make these ravines. We need a billion years. And the biologists were saying, we need a billion years to evolve everything. And he was saying, I'm only giving you 10 million years because that's the lifetime of the sun and there's no way we can make the sun live longer than that. And so then he got his ass handed to him when we discovered that there's thermonuclear fusion in the sun. And there's a whole other thing that was discovered after he made this proclamation. But he had the cockiness of a physicist knowing that physics is pretty fundamental.

[B]

From that day forward, nobody believed his sports predictions. I'm taking the Patriots in 30 points.

[C]

So my issue with panspermia is if you can make amino acids on rocks in space or in the parent body from which it came, you can make amino acids on Earth without the rock. Earth has got all the same ingredients and then some. So this urge to appeal to panspermia for me seemed less urgent. The urge was less urgent when I look at it that way. So maybe the. But maybe the argument in favor of it is it is really, really hard to make life. So if it happens in one place, the chances are it's not going to happen in other places. And if it's going to get there, it's going to have to travel. I think that's the out for. That's the argument in favor of panspermia. But yeah, because if it's easy to make amino acids but harder to make a DNA molecule, maybe that's what it comes down to.

[D]

There's one little catch to that in the sense of geology and that but the oldest rocks we have on earth are from 4 to about 4.4 billion years, which is one of many reasons we study Bennu samples, Ryugu samples and meteorites. Because in part the Earth is dynamic, it's active, it's moving, the surface is constantly moving. But also the very few tens of millions of years of the Earth's existence, the surface was really molten before the crust formed. And that's what a lot of the scientific hypothesis hit at, that it would cooked too much for these kinds of compounds to survive on Earth. Now maybe inside is another issue and maybe the meteorites coming down and seeding after the cooling happened either on Earth or on Mars is, you know, much more probable now than it was I think before we flew both missions. And in fact we have sugar too now we have RNA sugars. That's a really big deal too.

[B]

Yeah, the ribose right?

[C]

Or yeah, yeah, your sugar is to go with your multigrain cereals. Kellogg's better get a handle on this one. Of course as scientists we need to be sort of skeptical of extraordinary claims. If life can explain some of this evidence, can you get to that same evidence by not invoking life at all?

[D]

Well that's what we're learning from the study of anew samples and Ruger samples. And I can't give you an answer, yes or no, but it looking like a lot of it. A lot of the ingredients, yes, they can happen abiotically at least the ingredients for life. What happens after life comes about, how it changes that is another issue. But that is where we're going right now.

[C]

As a person who has is in front of the public explaining all of this, I, I have challenges because for example, when we see methane on Mars and we know methane is a product of, of anaerobic metabolism, better known as

[B]

Mexican food,

[D]

I ain't going there.

[C]

Yeah, I mean it's what happens deep in your gut gut. Right. The microbes operate anaerobically releasing methane. And so but yet the surface of Saturn's moon Titan has lakes of liquid methane. And so but there are no cows on Titan that we know of. So clearly methane is coming from non biotic means. And so so it's to Jump for joy. When we see a chemical signature of something that we know can come from life, we have to be very honest about all the ways that it might not.

[D]

Yeah. And that's also, I think, to bring it back a little bit to Bennu. I think that's why it's also so important that we know the context of what we're analyzing and understand very clearly what kind of geologic processes occurred to that particular rock or rocks. Because organic chemists, for example, they don't know geology. They don't need to know the geology. But we geologists have been very poor over the course of time at explaining what we mean when we say things are geologically processed. And it's much more complicated than what often is interpreted either by the organic chemist, biologist or even the general public. So we have to be very careful about. About that.

[C]

Now, at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned the possibility or being cautious about a rock that might hit Earth by, you know, 2200. I don't think you pull that number out of your ass, Bennu in.

[D]

Not this time. Not this time.

[B]

Either way, whether you pulled it out of your ass or not, either way,

[C]

good luck to those people.

[B]

I mean, like, I'm good. You say 2200.

[C]

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're out of. Yeah, you're out of the picture by then. But the next close encounter, if my records are correct, is in 2182 for Bennu. And there's a. And given our orbital uncertainties, I think there's a chance it could hit Earth in 2182. That should be plenty of time to build a defense system to deflect it. It should be, unless funding continues to wane.

[B]

Oh, then we're screwed.

[C]

But as geologists, you probably don't think much about asteroid collisions the way the astronomers do. Is that correct?

[D]

Probably. We look at what's left over.

[C]

Okay, that's. That's a great blunt. That's very blunt there, Harold. That's awesome.

[B]

Hey, look, when life gives you lemons, right, what are you gonna do?

[D]

Dizzy. I'm laughing so hard. Okay.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. So the probability that I last remembered, maybe it's been refined since I last checked it.

[D]

You're absolutely right, Bill.

[C]

It was a 1 in 2700 chance of hitting Earth in September of 2182.

[B]

And as they say, that's a non zero chance.

[C]

Non zero. And it sounds like, it sounds like, oh, that won't happen then. But there are people who go to Vegas betting on way worse odds than that, expecting to Win. So these are near Earth asteroids that we want to keep an eye on. And the more we know about them, the more we can maybe go back to them in the future and nudge them out of harm's way.

[D]

That's right. That's right. 100%.

[C]

You got it?

[D]

Yep. Now that we understand the composition better, that's a refined value that you gave and that's, that's, you know, that's probably as accurate as we're going to get, which is pretty accurate because I think it's September 24th of that year, the prediction is. So that's pretty, that's pretty accurate. But I may be wrong.

[C]

But yeah, yeah. Just to bring this to closure, could you just reflect on where you guys are as geologists? When I think of the history of collaborations, if we go back before 1968 and the photo of Earthrise over the lunar surface, it was not until NOAA was founded in the year 1970 that I ever saw the ocean and the atmosphere in the same phrase. NOAA is national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And my sense was they were ocean scientists and they were atmosphere scientists and of course, you have geologists on the land. And then as time moved on, the interplay of these major forces on Earth's surface required you guys to play nice in the sandbox. And then eventually we find is it more than half of the biotic mass on Earth is below Earth's surface. There's some staggering fraction of the mass of biology below Earth's surface, which means the geologist has to walk in the room and have something to say about that. So could you just reflect on the state of collaborations among the biologists, the geologists and of course the astro folk today.

[D]

Right. I think because of these sample return missions and other space missions were really an exciting time period in our history. And the way to get to this is simply talk about the connection between life and prebiotic compounds. We know life exists, we know that they're prebiotic compounds that exist. And there's a gap between the two. How do you get from one to the other? Right. And in the middle of that gap, we know you need things like oxygen, you need water, you need energy. But everybody forgets that. To get that, what you need is a planet and understanding how planets are formed and the baseline geology that then the final baseline below geology, the physics can all play into and then work with the astronomers, the remote sensors, the biologists, to put our various hypotheses together, to test them with our knowledge in a big, big picture scope.

[C]

Because of Course, the universe doesn't care about how we have divided our sciences. The universe is just the universe.

[D]

That's very true.

[C]

It's our problem that we have walls between the offices of what we study. Well, Howard, this has been a delight for you to participate in this conversation. I've long wanted to do a show on Bennu and because it's been in the news a bit now, so I'm glad we have could speak about it. With the benefit of the analysis that has been ongoing and just to toot the horns of scientists, I presume that parts of your sample return from Bennu have been shared with other labs so

[D]

that

[C]

whatever your results are could be verified, right?

[D]

Yeah. So NASA archives about 70% of the sample that the sample team analysis team doesn't get more than a very small amount of a subtotal sample. And then we had it exclusively for a two year period. And then the community at large, scientists at large, begin to apply for samples at Johnson Space center that they can look up samples in the catalog. And then they're all currently those people who have samples from around the world that are not part of the science team for Osiris Rex. Our team at Global2 are analyzing the sample as we speak and several papers have already been submitted to the scientific journal to talk about their findings in print. And yeah, it's incredible.

[C]

That's how science works.

[D]

Science works. Our government shared sample with the Japanese government as well and our Japanese colleagues, meaning Osiris Rex sample and Hayabusa sample were shared and each nation is also looking at their samples as well. So it's great.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

Impressive as science. That's how science works. The path to objective truths in this world is not from any one lab.

[B]

It is from.

[D]

No, it can't be.

[C]

It can't be shrinking your ass. Okay.

[D]

That's right. That's the creative process. That's exactly right, yeah.

[B]

Thanks for actually setting the example that none of us are going to follow.

[C]

Well, good luck for this. And what will you be doing in London? You're headed off there now.

[D]

Yeah. First, let me say thank you very much for the invitation and to join you both. It's been a lot of fun and I've learned a lot myself. And I really appreciate your kindness and I'm going to London for a three month stay at the work at the Natural History Museum in London where we'll be going back to the square root of one and taking what we learned from studying Astro Bennu and Astro Aurelio samples back into the lab and Looking at our meteorite collections and then I'll be doing a bunch of lectures around the UK as well on Osiris Rex. So it's time to go have a little bit of. Yeah, a little bit of rest and recharge the batteries.

[B]

Very nice, very nice.

[C]

And how do we. Where's our best source to keep current with Bennu? Does there a JPL have a page on that? Or is it Johnson? Or do you have a page from your lab that you found co founded?

[D]

Yeah, I post some things on my website and generally different members of the team. We have no centralized area other than NASA making its usual posts about what we find, so.

[C]

And your website is What?

[D]

Oh, it's HaroldConnelly.

[C]

WordPress.com WordPress okay, thank you. All good, sir.

[D]

I tried to keep it updated, but I'm happy.

[C]

Excellent. Thank you for this, Chuck. We're done here.

[B]

Well, this was great. I have to say I've learned more about Bennu than I ever thought I would. And I'm happy that I did.

[C]

And I learned that you don't care if it Hits Earth in September 2022.

[B]

Yeah, I'm good.

[C]

Not 2182.

[B]

First of all, let me just tell you something. If it does, my only regret is that I can't do my own touch and go mission where I collect nothing but spray paint. Hello, dumbasses on the side of the asteroid. For not deflecting me.

[D]

Deflecting me. Right? You've had all this time to do something.

[B]

You had all the stuff.

[D]

You're screwing it up, you morons.

[C]

All right, that's all the time we have. Harold Connolly Jr. Thanks for participating.

[D]

Nice to meet you, Chuck. Thank you so much, Chuck.

[C]

Always good to have you, man.

[B]

Always a pleasure.

[C]

This has been startalk the Benu Edition until next time. I bid you to keep looking up.

[A]

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[D]

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[C]

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