Your Guide to Asteroids, Comets, and Other Small Worlds

Why do we need sample return?

It may seem like a lot of trouble to fly all the way to another world just to bring a few handfuls of rock and soil back to Earth. But certain questions can only be answered by tools that are too large, heavy, and power-hungry to fly on spacecraft. Sample return is particularly important for:

Precision: Space-based instruments can’t tell us the date of a sample as accurately as Earth-based instruments can.

Reproducibility: On Earth, we can double-check our results with multiple instruments. That’s particularly important when those results could be something as astonishing as detecting life on another object.

Duration: Technology improves over time, so storing samples on Earth allows future generations to run newer, better experiments.

from The Planetary Society Articles https://ift.tt/32ASoeR
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