OSIRIS-REx's return from Bennu comes with a twist, as scientists face delays in disassembling the canister due to an abundance of material on the exterior.
NASA curation team members along with Lockheed Martin recovery specialists after the successful removal of the sample return canister lid.Scientists working to open up the sample canister containing rock and dust from asteroid Bennu have run into a problem: there’s just too much of it.. Scientists expected to find extra bits of the asteroid in the canister outside the TAGSAM, an articulated arm on the spacecraft with a round sampler head at the end used to grab the sample.
“The very best ‘problem’ to have is that there is so much material, it’s taking longer than we expected to collect it,” Christopher Snead, deputy OSIRIS-REx curation lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in a statement. “There’s a lot of abundant material outside the TAGSAM head that’s interesting in its own right. It’s really spectacular to have all that material there.”.
Bennu is a small, near-Earth asteroid that makes a close pass to Earth every six years or so. Scientists believe Bennu might have broken off from a much larger carbon-rich asteroid about 700 million to 2 billion years ago, and drifted much closer to Earth since then. Analyzing the asteroid sample may help scientists piece together the origin story of Earth, and how the building blocks of life could have been delivered to our planet by way of asteroids.
Over the coming weeks, the curation team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will move the TAGSAM head into a different specialized glovebox, where it will be disassembled to reveal the bulk sample within.in the Utah desert on September 24, from where it was airlifted to a clean room. From there, the clean room team packaged all the parts of the sample capsule for transport by aircraft to the Johnson Space Center.
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