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The US probe that collected samples 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, NASA officials say.
This capture of video frames from NASA shows the robotic arm of the Osiris-Rex spacecraft making contact with the asteroid Bennu to collect samples.
Photo: AFP / NASA TV
The probe’s robotic arm, OSIRIS-REx, lifted a rock cloud from debris on Bennu, a skyscraper-sized asteroid about 200 million miles from Earth on Wednesday (New Zealand time) and trapped the material in a collection device for the 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.
“Time is of the essence,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate science administrator, told reporters.
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.
Photo: AFP / NASA TV
NASA won’t know how much material it has collected until the sample capsule returns in 2023. The troubleshooting also led mission leaders to give up more chances to redo a collection attempt and instead vowed to begin. the return of the spacecraft to Earth next March.
“We honestly couldn’t have done a better collection experiment,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta told reporters, claiming a plentiful sample size.
But with the door thrown open 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 ($ NZ1.1 billion) minivan-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, launched in 2016 to collect and return the first American sample of pristine asteroid materials. Japan is the only other country that has accomplished such a feat.
Artwork: Osiris-Rex approaching the surface of the asteroid Bennu.
Photo: NASA / GODDARD / UOA
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.
– Reuters
