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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: A NASA spacecraft is littered with so much asteroid debris from this week’s attack that it is stuck and precious particles are moving away in space, scientists said Friday (October 23).
Scientists announced the news three days after the Osiris-Rex spacecraft briefly touched the asteroid Bennu 200 million miles away.
The mission’s chief scientist, Dante Lauretta, said Tuesday’s operation collected much 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.
The team was struggling to put the sample container in the return capsule Tuesday, much earlier than originally planned, for the long drive home. The particles continue to escape and the scientists want to minimize the loss.
“Time is of the essence,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s chief of science missions.
A cloud of asteroid particles could be seen spinning around the spacecraft as it moved away from Bennu, at least half an ounce (5 to 10 grams) at any one time. The situation appeared to stabilize, according to Lauretta, once the robot’s arm stopped moving and was locked in place.
The requirement for Orisis-Rex, NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, totaling more than US $ 800 million, was at least 2 ounces (60 grams) of samples for return. The carbon-rich material contains the conserved building blocks of our solar system and could help scientists better understand how planets formed and how life originated on Earth.
Launched in 2016, the spacecraft reached Bennu in 2018. Regardless of what’s on board, it will leave the vicinity of the asteroid in March. The samples will not return to Earth until 2023.
Japan is expecting its second batch of samples taken from a different asteroid, in December.
