‘It’s open!’: Nasa finally unlocks canister of dust from 4.6bn-year-old asteroid

A view of the outside of the Osiris-Rex sample collector, with sample material from the asteroid Bennu, at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Photograph: NASA/Reuters

Curators at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston have said they are “overjoyed” to have finally got a canister of asteroid dust open, four months after it parachuted down through the Earth’s atmosphere into the Utah desert.

The space administration announced Friday that it had successfully removed two stuck fasteners that had prevented some of the samples collected in 2020 from the 4.6bn-year-old asteroid Bennu, which is classified as a “potentially hazardous” because it has one in 1,750 chance of crashing into Earth by 2300.