2024-01-12 05:44:00
(CNN) — NASA announced Thursday that, after a month-long process, a sample of valuable material from an asteroid was finally released.
The space agency had already collected about 70 grams of rocks and dust from its OSIRIS-REx mission, which traveled almost 6 billion kilometers to collect this unprecedented sample from the near-Earth asteroid called Bennu.
But NASA revealed in October that some of the material remained out of reach in a capsule hidden inside an instrument called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, a robotic arm with a storage container on one end that collected the sample. Bennu.
According to NASA, the sampler head is held closed by 35 latches, but two of them proved too difficult to open.
Releasing the mechanism is not an easy task. The space agency must use pre-approved materials and tools around the capsule to minimize the risk of damaging or contaminating samples.
The OSIRIS-REx preservation team appears on January 10 attempting to remove one of the latches that prevented the sample head of the touch-and-go sample acquisition mechanism, or TAGSAM, from fully opening. The instrument contained additional material from the asteroid Bennu. (Credit: Robert Markowitz/NASA)
These “new tools also had to work in the tight space of the glove compartment, which limited their height, weight and possible movement of the bow,” explains Dr. Nicole Lunning, head of OSIRIS-REx conservation at the Space Center, in a statement. Johnson of NASA in Houston. “The healing team showed impressive resilience and did an incredible job removing these stubborn fasteners from the TAGSAM head so we could continue disassembly. We are delighted with the success.”
To fix the problem, NASA said two tools were created from surgical steel, “the hardest metal approved for use in pristine healing glove boxes.”
Before tackling the stuck fasteners, a team at Johnson Space Center tested the tools in a “test lab,” slowly increasing the applied torque to ensure the new tools could successfully remove the inflexible fasteners.
What the asteroid sample has revealed so far
On Thursday afternoon, NASA reported that the material trapped in the sample had not yet been revealed. “A few additional disassembly steps remain,” according to the space agency. After completing those steps, the hidden cache can be photographed, extracted and weighed, NASA said.
An analysis of Bennu material that NASA researchers had collected last fall already revealed that samples from the asteroid contained abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals, as well as carbon.
Scientists believe signs of water on asteroids bolster the current theory of how it reached Earth billions of years ago.
“The reason the Earth is a habitable world, that we have oceans and lakes and rivers and rain, is because these clay minerals landed on Earth between 4 billion and 4.5 billion years ago, making our world habitable,” he said. in October OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta. “So we’re looking at the way the water got incorporated into the solid material.” Lauretta is a professor of Planetary Sciences and Cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona.
Some of the previously collected Bennu samples have been hermetically sealed in storage containers for future study over decades, according to NASA’s press release Thursday.
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