A NASA Probe Is So Full of Asteroid Material That It Now Has A Problem

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An artist’s rendering shows NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft descending toward the asteroid Bennu to collect a sample of the asteroid’s surface.

NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

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NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

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This series of three images taken on Thursday shows that the sampler head on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is full of rocks and dust collected from the surface of the asteroid Bennu. They show also that some of these particles are slowly escaping the sampler head, possibly through small gaps where the head’s Mylar flap is slightly wedged open. The Mylar flap (the black bulge on the left inside the ring) is designed to keep the collected material locked inside, and these unsealed areas appear to be caused by larger rocks that didn’t fully pass through the flap.

Credit: NASA

To prevent any further loss, the team is now preparing to stow the sample collection device quickly into its return capsule, possibly starting the stowing process as soon as Tuesday. The capsule is expected to return to Earth in 2023.

Researchers believe they collected hundreds of grams of material, but they won’t know for sure until the capsule returns to Earth.

They had been planning a maneuver that would spin the spacecraft and let them make a precise determination of how much rock and dusty material they’d gotten. The thinking was that if they hadn’t managed to collect much, they might have another go at touching the asteroid in January and getting some more.

But they called off the spacecraft-spinning trick when they realized that the collector is so full that material is jamming it open and that stuff is being lost.

That’s because they want to minimize the spacecraft’s movement until the rock and dust sample is safely sealed up in the return capsule. «It would risk loss of material,» Lauretta says. «We have enough evidence of successful sample collection.»

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Nothing like this problem was ever seen in simulations of the mission that the team did on Earth, he says. It’s now looking like the collection device must have penetrated farther down into the asteroid’s surface than expected — perhaps as deep as 48 centimeters, or about a foot and a half.

«I basically directed the team to put as minimal activity on the spacecraft as necessary and start focusing on the early stow of sample,» Lauretta says. «It’s very exciting, very surprising, but overall, excellent news.»

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