NASA gets access to rest of asteroid sample
NASA curators have removed two stubborn fasteners that prevented them for months from accessing much of the rocks and dust collected from a distant asteroid.
The sample, NASA’S treasure chest from a seven-year mission that traveled 3.9 billion miles to the asteroid Bennu and back, reached the Johnson Space Center in Houston on Sept. 25. The team was able to access 70 grams of material — 10 grams more than the mission’s goal — but they could not get to much of the additional sample collected by the OSIRIS-REX mission.
The fasteners were removed this week, NASA said, and the agency will soon weigh the sample to determine the total mass collected from Bennu.
“We are all excited to see the remaining treasure OSIRISREX holds,” Eileen Stansbery, division chief for Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science at NASA’S Johnson Space Center, said in a statement. She praised the engineers and scientists who had worked to open it, noting they had to “design, develop, and test new tools that allowed us to move past this hurdle.”
NASA had to create tools that would loosen the fasteners but not contaminate the sample collected from the asteroid.
The curation team now plans to release a catalog of the OSIRIS-REX samples in the spring, and scientists around the world can request specific materials to study.
NASA scientists already have found an abundance of carbon and water — two components crucial to life on Earth — in a sample they previously accessed. This could support the theory that asteroids helped spur life by crashing into the planet.
Some NON-NASA scientists also have begun studying the material.
Thomas Zega, a member of the OSIRIS-REX science team and a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, received one of the first samples from the previously accessed material. The University of Arizona leads the mission’s science team and its science observation planning and data processing.
He left the Johnson Space Center not long after the sample arrived with a little bit of Bennu tucked inside his carry-on luggage.
“It was like 7 or 8 o’clock at night I think when we got back from Houston, so I joke that it was under the cover of darkness,” Zega said.
He immediately brought the material, safely packed inside a nitrogen-filled bag, to the lab in Tucson, Ariz., and his team has been studying particle sizes, minerals, chemical composition and more.
“When we combine all of that information together, it helps us piece together a chemical history and story of the minerals and how they may have come to be on asteroid Bennu,” Zega said.
Zega said he wasn’t surprised or concerned by the stuck fasteners. The OSIRISREX team had considered various issues that could arise. The spacecraft, after all, had to survive extreme environments, from a rocket launch to tagging an asteroid to reentering Earth’s atmosphere and landing.
He wanted to give NASA’S curation team time to find the proper way to remove the fasteners without contaminating the sample.
The public, however, was less patient.
“Very well-intentioned people were like, ‘Well, hey, why don’t you just drill it out?’ ” Zega said. “My dad was asking me about it. He said, ‘Come on, surely they know how to get out a stuck bolt.’ ”