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HOUSTON — Precious material taken from an asteroid was trapped in two stubborn clasps — but after a month-long process, it has finally been freed, NASA announced Thursday.
The space agency has already collected about 2.5 oz. Rocks and dust were collected.
But in October, NASA announced that an instrument called the Touch-and-Go Sample Collection Mechanism (a robotic arm with a storage container at one end that collects samples from Bennu) would have an inaccessible capsule hidden inside a device called the Touch-and-Go Sample Collection Mechanism. It was revealed that some material remained.
The sampler head is held closed with 35 fasteners, two of which proved too difficult to open, NASA said.
Prying the mechanism loose is not an easy task. Space agencies must use pre-approved materials and tools around the capsule to minimize the risk of sample damage or contamination.
These “new tools also had to work within the confined space of the glovebox, which limits height, weight, and potential arc movement,” says OSIRIS–at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. said Dr. Nicole Lanning, REx Head of Curation. statement. “The curation team has shown great resilience and has done an incredible job removing these stubborn fasteners from TAGSAM’s heads, allowing us to continue disassembling them. We are overjoyed with our success.”
To address this issue, NASA said the two tools were made from surgical steel, “the hardest metal approved for use in early curation gloveboxes.”
Before tackling a stuck fastener, the team at Johnson Space Center tests the tool in a “rehearsal lab,” slowly increasing the applied torque to see if the new tool can successfully remove the stubborn fastener. Ta.
What asteroid samples have revealed so far
As of Thursday afternoon, NASA said the captured sample material had not yet been released. The space agency said “several further disassembly steps” remain. After taking these steps, the hidden cache can be photographed, extracted and weighed, NASA said.
Analysis of Bennu material collected last fall by NASA researchers has already revealed that the asteroid samples contain not only carbon but also abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals.
Scientists believe that traces of water on the asteroid support current theories about how the asteroid reached Earth billions of years ago.
“The reason Earth is a habitable world, and the reason we have oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain, is because these clay minerals landed on Earth 4 billion to 4.5 billion years ago and made our world habitable. Because we made it possible,” REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta said in October. “So we’re looking at how water gets incorporated into solid materials.” Lauretta is a regents professor of planetary science and astrochemistry at the University of Arizona.
Some of the previously collected Bennu samples have been sealed in storage containers for decades of future research, according to a NASA news release Thursday.