It took more than two years to get there, and two-and-a-half to return. It was a spaceship that collected samples from a faraway asteroid. Samples which hold the potential key to early life here on Earth.

Leading the NASA mission to preserve those important samples is a curator who is now a professor at the University of Rochester.

The pictures Kevin Righter shows are the culmination of years of preparation.

“We had all these uncertainties to think about during the planning,” Righter said.

Righter spent 22 years at NASA as curator for meteorites that fell in the Antarctic.

“It’s been a fantastic experience,” he said.

More recently, Righter served as the lead curator for the space agency’s OSIRIS-REx mission. The mission collected samples from the asteroid Bennu, which is more than 100 million miles away. Righter led the effort to figure out how to keep the samples clean. 

”That caused a lot of frustration over the years, not knowing exactly what the material would be,” he said. “Not only its composition, but its physical nature. How large the pieces would be, how fragile.”

They are pieces that would provide scientists with evidence of molecules, dating back billions of years, that are the key to life on Earth.

“We have this material that’s coming from the asteroid belt that appears to be carbon-rich,” said Righter. “It could be the kind of material that provided some of the building blocks for life on early Earth. And our knowledge of that material is very poor.”

That’s because previously, access to materials to study was limited to fragments of a small number of meteors that had fallen to Earth. The samples collected from Bennu are pristine. Thanks to Righter and his team, they’re preserved.

“That’s a big deal,” he said. “That alone is a very kind of satisfying thing to be involved with, knowing that you're creating, you're building a foundation for future scientists.”

They are scientists from around the world who will study the potential origins of life on our world.

“It does look good,” said Righter. “And the fact that new phases and compounds are being found and documented that were a surprise to everyone is really what science is all about.”