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Images transmitted to ground control revealed that it trapped more material than scientists anticipated and spewed an excess of scaly asteroid rocks into space.
A US probe that collected a sample from an asteroid earlier this week recovered so much material that a rock is wedged into the container door, allowing the rocks to spill back into space.
On Tuesday, the probe’s robotic arm, OSIRIS-REx, lifted a rock cloud of debris on Bennu, a skyscraper-sized asteroid about 320 million kilometers (200 million miles) from Earth and trapped the material. in a harvesting device to return to Earth.
But images of the spacecraft’s collection head transmitted to ground control revealed that it had captured more material than scientists anticipated and was spewing excess scaly asteroid rocks into space.
The leak prompted the OSIRIS-REx mission team to rush to put away the collection device to prevent further spills.
“Timing is of the essence,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate science administrator, told reporters on Friday.
Zurbuchen said that mission teams will miss the opportunity to measure how much material they collected as originally planned and will move on to the storage phase, a fragile process of storing the sample collection container in a secure position inside the spacecraft without push more valuable material.
Good news: On October 20, our @OSIRISREx The spacecraft captured more than enough material from the asteroid Bennu to meet the mission requirements. The team is now focused on storing the sample to return to Earth in 2023: https://t.co/4etvnJzXfn #ToBennuAndBack pic.twitter.com/ILUzEJZHD8
– NASA (@NASA) October 23, 2020
NASA won’t know how much material it collected until the sample capsule returns in 2023.
The problem solving also led mission leaders to forgo more opportunities to redo a harvest attempt, and instead vowed to begin the spacecraft’s return to Earth next March.
“Honestly, we couldn’t have done a better collection experiment,” said OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta.
But with the door lodged by a stone and the “disturbing” images of the sample spill, “we are almost victims of our own success here,” he added.
The approximately $ 800 million minivan-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, launched in 2016 to collect and return America’s first sample of pristine asteroid materials.
Asteroids are among the remnants of the formation of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.
A sample could contain clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists say.
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