Curators at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston said they were “delighted” to have finally recovered a container of asteroid dust, four months after it parachuted through Earth’s atmosphere in the Utah desert.
The space administration announced on Friday that it had been successfully removed two fasteners which prevented some of the samples collected in 2020 from the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu, which is classified as a “potentially hazardous” because it has a one in 1,750 chance of hitting the planet by 2300 fall to earth
Most of the rock samples collected by Nasa’s Osiris-Rex mission were retrieved shortly after the spacecraft landed in September, but additional material remained in a sampler head that was difficult to access.
After months of struggling with the last two of 35 fasteners, scientists in Houston managed to get them loose. “It’s open! It’s open!” NASA’s Planetary Science Division placed on Twitter/X. The department also posted a photo of dust and small stones in the container.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the team designed custom tools made from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel to open them — all without the samples being contaminated by Earth air. Nasa said it will now analyze the 9-ounce sample.
“These are some of the oldest materials to form in our solar system,” Ashley King of London’s Natural History Museum said last year.
“Monsters from Asteroids [such as this] tell us what all those ingredients were to make a planet like Earth and they also tell us what the recipe was – so how did those materials come together and start mixing to end up with [habitable environments]?” King added.
The billion-dollar spacecraft that collected the sample from Bennu, a space rock from the earliest days of the solar system, and released a container to Earth is now on its way to a peanut-shaped asteroid called Apophis.
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For a time, astronomers thought that Apophis might be on its way to smash into planet Earth, but those fears have subsided and scientists expect it to pass closer to Earth in 2029 than any object of its size ever has.
After the curatorial team managed to cut open the capsule and retrieve the remaining material, Eileen Stansbery, division chief for Ares (Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science) at Johnson, said they were “all excited to see the remaining treasure that contain Osiris-Rex.” .
Dr. Nicole Lunning, Osiris-Rex Curator at Johnson, said in a statement: “The curation team showed impressive resilience and did an incredible job of getting these stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head so we could proceed with disassembly. We are delighted with the success.”
