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In case the news got lost, NASA performed a rather complicated maneuver: it collected dust from the asteroid Bennu, a rock that travels through space at a speed of 200 million miles from Earth.
In fact, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft did the job so well that a problem has emerged since Tuesday’s collection. Some of the sample is leaking into space because a lid got stuck with large chunks of material.
“The big concern now is that the particles are escaping because we are almost victims of our own success,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said via CNN. “The large particles left the lid open. The particles are diffusing into space. They are not moving fast, but it is nonetheless valuable scientific material.”
Four years after its launch, the spacecraft recovered a bit of Bennu on Tuesday in a process that took just 16 seconds.
NASA has had to change plans due to the leak. The agency intends to have the collection device stored in its return capsule as early as Tuesday, opting to skip a step where the sample would be measured. NASA knows it collected more than enough, but now it won’t know the exact size of the collection until it reaches Earth in 2023.
“I was quite concerned when I saw these images appear, and I think the most prudent course of action is to very safely store what we have and minimize any massive losses in the future,” Lauretta said, according to the Washington Post.
Tuesday marked the first time NASA collected material from an asteroid.
“Bennu continues to surprise us with great science and also throwing some curveballs,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate science administrator, in a statement. “And while we may have to move faster to store the sample, it is not a bad problem. We are very excited to see what appears to be a rich sample that will inspire science for decades beyond this historic moment.”
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