For months, bits of an asteroid collected by a U.S. probe during a billion-mile trek were out of reach to scientists, locked inside a return capsule in a NASA facility with two stuck fasteners preventing access to the rocky space treasure. This week, NASA won its battle against those fasteners.
On Wednesday (Jan. 10), NASA technicians finally removed the stuck fasteners from the sample return capsule of its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft — which completed the first asteroid sample return mission in U.S. history when it landed in Utah in September 2023. Tucked in its capsule were rocks and dust collected from the asteroid Bennu. Initially, the team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas was able to access 70.3 grams (2.48 ounces) of material — 10 grams more than the mission’s goal — from the outside of the sampler head, called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM).
