About five weeks ago, NASA's OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft landed in the desert in the US state of Utah, after a journey that lasted seven years and nearly 6.5 billion kilometers. But with all due respect to the spacecraft itself, and to the enormous efforts and budgets invested in its construction, the real star on this landing was the excess cargo that returned with it to Earth – a sample of real stardust collected from the asteroid Bennu. We used ChatGPT to understand its price and justification.
Bennu is an enormous rock with a mass of 85 million tons, or about 77.6 billion kilograms (a ton in this sense is not exactly 1,000 kilograms), of which the US space agency collected only about 255 grams of material. For these 255 grams, the spacecraft was budgeted at $800 million, but exceeded this budget and actually cost $1.16 billion – an imaginary price for such a quantity of material. In other words, Bennu's stardust costs $132 million an ounce, or $4.7 million per gram—70,000 times the price of an equivalent amount of gold.
This may sound exaggerated, especially since about 50 tons of meteorites enter Earth every day – tiny space rocks that can be collected and analyzed if reached before they burn up from friction with the atmosphere. But the quarter pound of Bennu's ancient remains aren't just crackers for Shabbat—they may be the key to understanding the formation of our solar system and the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. Scientists are eager to delve into this treasure to unravel the riddles of existence.
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