AME Students Help Analyze OSIRIS-REx Sample

After a journey of more than 1 billion miles, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has returned a sample from the asteroid Bennu to Earth — and now University of Arizona students are taking a closer look.

OSIRIS-REx, the United States' first asteroid sample return mission, is being led UA professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry Dante Lauretta. AME students Maanyaa Kapur and Zach Purdie are NASA interns and members of the sample analysis team at the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Kapur, who earned her bachelor’s at the UA and is completing a master’s, knew she wanted to work in aerospace since she first saw images of the Mars Curiosity Rover in 2012. She began her NASA internship in 2021. Purdie served in the U.S. Navy for five years, working as an avionics technician before beginning his studies. He began his internship a little over a year ago and is in the final year of undergraduate studies.

Scientists at the UA and elsewhere will study the Bennu sample for decades to learn more about the formation of the solar system. Under the tutelage of Andrew Ryan, a research scientist at the LPL, Purdie and Kapur were part of a team that designed and developed an apparatus to assess the thermal conductivity of the sample. Knowing how well the asteroid conducts heat will help researchers identify the make-up of the asteroid.  

"Sometime in the very very far future, they think that Bennu could be on it's path to collide with earth. In a situation like that where you have to shoot an asteroid down, you really want to know the physical and thermal quantities to know how it would even break down," Kapur said in an interview with KVOA.