SPACE: Returned Asteroid Sample Canister Contains Way More Asteroid Than Expected.

Scientists working to open up the sample canister containing rock and dust from asteroid Bennu have run into a problem: there’s just too much of it.

The process of disassembling the TAGSAM (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) head is taking longer than anticipated due to the abundance of material found when the canister lid was removed last week, NASA wrote in a blog post. But that’s not a bad problem to have.

In October 2020, OSIRIS-REx landed on near-Earth asteroid Bennu and snagged a sample from its surface. Scientists expected to find extra bits of the asteroid in the canister outside the TAGSAM, an articulated arm on the spacecraft with a round sampler head at the end used to grab the sample. This assumption arose when they observed particles slowly escaping the head before it was stowed, according to NASA. Not only was this assumption correct, but there were also significantly more dark particles coating the inside of the canister lid and base surrounding TAGSAM than anticipated.

“The very best ‘problem’ to have is that there is so much material, it’s taking longer than we expected to collect it,” Christopher Snead, deputy OSIRIS-REx curation lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in a statement. “There’s a lot of abundant material outside the TAGSAM head that’s interesting in its own right. It’s really spectacular to have all that material there.”

Next up: NASA’s ‘Psyche’ Mission To Quadrillion-Dollar Asteroid Is Go.