Who doesn’t love showing off their cool rock collection? Last week, after months of struggle, NASA released a peek inside. The space agency on Friday released high-resolution images from the newly opened Touch and Go Sample Collection Mechanism (TAGSAM), revealing all the dust and rock that Osiris-Rex scraped off the asteroid’s surface.
The images are large, so you can zoom in to see every detail of the sample.Check out the full size version . There is plenty of material for the scientist and members of his OSIRIS-REx team to work on. They said in September that they plan to take full advantage of microanalytical techniques to “actually break it down to an almost atomic scale.” Estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, the asteroid Bennu may contain clues to the formation of our solar system and how the building blocks of life first appeared on Earth.
Scientists have already found traces of carbon and water in extra material found outside TAGSAM. They had hoped to collect at least 2.1 ounces (60 grams) of regolith from the asteroid, but OSIRIS-REx was able to collect much more than that. The team obtained his 2.48 ounces (70.3 grams) solely from the “bonus” material accumulated on the sample hardware. NASA plans to analyze some of the samples over the next two years, but most will be preserved for future research and shared with other scientists.