July 29, 2014 -
It is too small and the radiation doses would kill anything living on the asteroid in a very short time. We had to prove this as part of our Planetary Protection rating – which is Unrestricted Earth Return – meaning that we do not have to take any special precautions to avoid contaminating the Earth with extraterrestrial life. Instead, we hope to find organic molecules that may have led to the origin of life on Earth. We will focus on measuring the organic molecular inventory of the samples but don’t have any plans for biological assays. We will keep the sample under nitrogen purge to avoid contaminating it with terrestrial microbes.