NASA has successfully tallied all the asteroid samples collected by a spacecraft last autumn, and the amount is twice the original goal.
Due to stuck fasteners, it took NASA longer than anticipated to open the sample container.
The carbon-rich samples, which are the first ever collected from an asteroid by NASA, are being kept at a specialized curation lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Osiris-Rex brought back the samples in September of last year, three years after gathering them from the asteroid. The $1 billion mission would have yielded more samples, but rocks caused the container lid to jam and some samples drifted away.
The spacecraft is now en route to another space rock, but this time it will only conduct a flyby without stopping to collect samples.
2024-02-18 02:00:04
Link from phys.org