Smithsonian shares how NASA scientists are studying four grams of rocks and dirt scooped from the asteroid Bennu as part of the OSIRIS-REx mission.

Inside the bland, brick-and-steel Building 34 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Maryland, scientists are about to run a series of tests that will have profound results. They are investigating about four grams of rocks and dirt scooped from the asteroid Bennu as part of the OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned a spacecraft to Earth last September with a tiny cargo—121.6 grams in total, or less than five ounces. Present at the creation of the solar system, when clouds of gas and dust were coalescing into the sun and the planets, the dirt awaiting analysis at the Goddard lab is among the oldest stuff on Earth. The spacecraft traveled 3.86 billion miles on a mission that took seven years in order to collect it.

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