Osiris-Rex travelled around 6-billion km to get to asteroid Bennu, pick up some samples, and get them back to Earth. Now, you won’t often see people more excited by dirt, but this is dirt from another planet – which as a consequence of being other-worldly is rather rare on Earth. And it might just help astronomers fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge about the origins of the Solar System.
Unfortunately, there was a bit of a problem retrieving the samples. NASA couldn’t open the canister that contained the dirt. For a while all they could do was pick at the rock and dust from outside. Even still, they managed to get more than 70g of the precious material despite their agricultural attempts, which was not a bad effort considering they only expected 60g in total including whatever was inside the canister. The problem seemed to be that the NASA engineers out-thought themselves when designing the canister fasteners in an attempt to make sure everything was completely secure.
The good news now is that they have finally managed to get the lid off the canister and have managed to retrieve 121.6g of material in total. Time for the screwdriver operators to go home, and the scientists to get to work.
