Some long-awaited surprises were revealed from some asteroid samples collected by the University of Arizona-led OSIRIS-REx mission. The deep dive into the sample of rocks and dust was years in the making as University of Arizona researchers had a chance to study something out of this world. The largest asteroid sample ever returned to Earth from the asteroid, Bennu. It's over 170 million miles away and it’s considered a near-Earth asteroid.
We're probably pretty familiar with this in Arizona. If you have hard water, and you build up those white, crusty salts that clog your shower head and your faucets, that's the same kind of process that we're seeing on these asteroid samples. You had a salty liquid and it evaporated away and left what we call evaporite minerals behind," Lauretta said.