Following him, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, Dante Lauretta showed four more finely detailed images of the sample all taken by an electron microscope, and spoke more about the significance of carbon. He described the material as water-bearing clay minerals which have water locked inside their fibrous, serpentine crystal structures. “That is how we think water got to the Earth. The reason that Earth is a habitable world—that we have oceans and lakes and rain—is because these clay minerals landed on Earth 4 to 4.5 billion years ago making our world habitable,” he said. “Not just Earth, but probably Venus and Mars” in the days of the early solar system.
As he flipped through the images, he showed how some of the material has a hexagonal shape characteristic of sulfur, which, he said, is critical for biology. “A lot of the amino acids that give structure to our cells…
