The off-Earth material will be stored and curated at Johnson Space Center.
The Bennu sample will now make its way to a newly built curation facility at JSC managed by the agency's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division.
The OSIRIS-REx science team — which includes more than 200 people based at 35 institutions around the world — will then study the sample for about two years in an effort to meet the mission's main science goals. As the above JSC post noted, those goals include better understanding how the solar system formed and evolved and the role carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in delivering life's building blocks to Earth.
The science team will have access to about 25% of the Bennu material, which is thought to weigh about 8.8 ounces . Four percent of the sample will go to the Canadian Space Agency, which provided OSIRIS-REx's laser altimeter instrument.
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