Images covered in ground control show that scientists have captured more material than scientists expected and that the number of asteroid rocks in space is higher.
A U.S. The probe, which collected samples from a planet earlier this week, found so much material that a stone was hung in the door of the container, allowing the rocks to re-emerge into space.
On Tuesday, the probe’s robotic arm, OSIRIS-Rex, kicked a debris cloud over Bennu, which came about 320 million kilometers (200 million miles) from Earth from a skyscraper-shaped planet and trapped the material in a storage device. Return to Earth.
But images of the spacecraft’s collection head returning to ground control revealed that scientists had captured more material than scientists had expected and that an asteroid with nails in the space was splitting too much.
The OSIRIS-Rex mission team in the leak roamed the stove to stove the storage device to prevent additional spillage.
“Time is of the essence,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator of science, told reporters on Friday.
The mission teams will leave their stock to measure how much material they collect according to the original plan and move on to the stove phase, a delicate process of keeping the sample storage container in a safe position inside the spacecraft without joking the more valuable material, Zurbuchen said.
The good news: 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 stoving the model to return to Earth in 2023: https://t.co/4etvnJzXfn #ToBennuAndBack pic.twitter.com/ILUzEJZHD8
– NASA (@ NASA) October 23, 2020
NASA will not know how much material it will collect until the sample capsule returns in 2023.
Troubleshooting enabled mission leaders to abandon more possibilities to redo the collection and instead committed to launching the spacecraft back to Earth next March.
“Quite honestly, we couldn’t have experimented with a better collection,” said Dante Loretta, chief investigator at OSIRIS-Rex.
But, the door is opened by “related” images of a rock and a sprinkling of specimens, “we are almost the victims of our success here,” he added.
The વાન 800m minivan-sized OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft, built by Lan Kahid Martin, was launched in 2016 with the first U.S. supply of Pristine asteroid materials. To capture and return the sample.
About a billion. Asteroids are among the debris left from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
One specimen could hold the key to the origin of life on Earth, scientists say.
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