After months of waiting, NASA said on Friday it has finally opened the OSIRIS-Rex sampler head to access the precious sample from the asteroid Bennu contained inside. The sample container landed on Earth in September but two fasteners of the container were stuck, preventing the opening of the container.
But on January 10, NASA engineers were able to remove the two stuck fasteners that prevented the opening of the sample container. The container carries precious cargo — about 250 grams of material from the asteroid Bennu collected by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft about two years ago.
After seven years in space, the OSIRIX-REx mission “parcel dropped” the sample container to Earth without entering the planet’s atmosphere. The canister was dropped with a precise trajectory, causing it to land at a location in a Utah desert chosen by the American space agency.
An initial analysis of some material that was stuck on the arm used to collect the sample revealed evidence of high carbon content and water. Essentially, it indicated the presence of important building blocks of life on the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid.
After opening the full sample container, NASA officials used high-resolution precision photography and a semio-automated focus stacking procedure to capture the above photograph of the open TAGSAM (Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism) head with the asteroid material inside.
The next step is for the team to remove the round metal collar that you can see in the image and transfer the sample from the TAGSAM head into sample trays. The samples will once again be photographed after they are transferred to the trays, and they will be stored at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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First uploaded on: 24-01-2024 at 1:05 PM IST
