This is John Batchel, a conversation on Hotel Mars with Harold Connolly,

mission sample scientist for two probes of asteroids, returning samples, Ryugu and Benu.

Here we speak of Benu and why it is that the carbonaceous chondritic material is not commonplace on the samples we have on earth.

And the way to solve that was to go to Banu and take a sample, looking for what is generally understood as prebiotic life,

that is the conditions that are conducive to life creation as we understand it.

Heat, water, and rock for food in an asteroid.

Possible.

Here's Harold Connolly to explain why the population of really good asteroids is not commonplace on Earth.

In Antarctica, for example,

where we find a lot of meteorites

plunged into the ice

for tens of thousands of years.

More of this later tonight on Hotel Mars.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So Benu, like Rugu,

is a carbonaceous, conritic-like asteroid. And those are clearly underrepresented in our collections here on Earth.

We have carbonaceous asteroid parts or bits, which we call meteorites.

But in the asteroid asteroid itself, they are

underrepresented. And we now know that the material most likely doesn't survive very well

going through our atmosphere from these two missions of Cyrus-Rex and High Abusa-2.

And therefore, that may be another reason why they're underrepresented on Earth.

There are other kinds of chondrites and meteorites that we find on Earth and more abundance.

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