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A NASA spacecraft is littered with so much asteroid debris from this week’s attack that it is stuck and precious particles are drifting away into space, the scientists said.
Scientists announced the news three days after the Osiris-Rex spacecraft briefly touched the asteroid Bennu, NASA’s first attempt at such a mission.
The mission’s chief scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said Tuesday’s operation (local time) 322 million kilometers away collected far more material than expected to return to Earth, by hundreds of grams.
However, the sample container at the end of the robot arm penetrated so deeply into the asteroid and with such force that the rocks were sucked up and stuck around the edge of the lid.
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The Osiris-Rex spacecraft touches the surface of the asteroid Bennu.
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Scientists estimate that the sampler pressed up to 19 inches into the black, rugged, and crumbling terrain.
“We are almost a victim of our own success here,” Lauretta said at a hastily organized press conference.
Lauretta said there is nothing flight controllers can do to clear the obstructions and prevent more fragments from escaping from Bennu, other than get the samples to their return capsule as soon as possible.
Therefore, the flight crew was struggling to get the sample container back into the capsule on Tuesday, much earlier than originally planned, for the long journey home.
“Time is of the essence,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s chief of science missions.
NASA / Goddard / University of Arizona
A view of the asteroid Bennu from the Osiris-Rex spacecraft.
This is NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission. Bennu was chosen because its carbon-rich material is believed to contain the conserved building blocks of our solar system. Obtaining pieces of this cosmic time capsule could help scientists better understand how planets formed billions of years ago and how life originated on Earth.
Scientists were stunned, and then dismayed, on Thursday when they saw the images coming from Osiris-Rex following his successful touch-and-march on Bennu two days earlier.
A cloud of asteroid particles could be seen spinning around the spacecraft as it moved away from Bennu. The situation appeared to stabilize, according to Lauretta, once the robot’s arm was locked in place. But it was impossible to know exactly how much had been lost.
The requirement for the more than $ 800 million mission was to bring back a minimum of 60 grams.
Regardless of what’s on board, Osiris-Rex will continue to leave the vicinity of the asteroid in March; that’s the earliest possible exit given the relative locations of Earth and Bennu. The samples will not return until 2023, seven years after the spacecraft left Cape Canaveral.
Osiris-Rex will continue to move away from Bennu and will not orbit it again, while it awaits its scheduled departure.
Due to the sudden turn of events, scientists will not know how much the sample capsule contains until it returns to Earth. They initially planned to spin the spacecraft to measure the contents, but that maneuver was canceled as it could spill even more debris.
“I think we will have to wait until we get home to find out exactly how much we have,” Lauretta told reporters. “As you can imagine, that is difficult. … But the good news is that we see a lot of material. “
Meanwhile, Japan is awaiting its second batch of samples taken from a different asteroid, expected in December.
