REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA-The OSIRIS-REx space capsule belonging to the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which sent asteroid samples some 200 million miles away already produces surprises. The agency’s staff opened the space capsule and discovered that the inside of the lid was coated with a mysterious black material, forcing them to stop work.
Unlike the handfuls of rock and dust scooped up from the asteroid’s surface, the black material appears smoother, almost like the dirt that coats a dirty car.
NASA said the material would undergo a ‘cursory analysis’ to find out what it actually was, but a scientist had to weigh in before an official decision was issued.
Launch MailOnline, Tuesday (3/10/2023), Dr Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University in Canberra, said the fine dust may also be material from asteroids. “The asteroid dirt is very dark and fine,” Dr Tucker told MailOnline.
When OSIRIS-REx performs a touch-and-go maneuver to collect samples, there are many things that prevent the lid from closing. NASA admitted shortly after retrieval in October 2020 that asteroid material from OSIRIS-REx was leaking because a rock was caught in the mechanism. “Eventually they cleared it up, so it looks like it’s dust and dirt,” added Dr Tucker.
Professor Trevor Ireland, a geochemist at the University of Queensland, agreed that black dust appeared during sample collection. “Under microgravity, there is nothing to stop the dust from spreading everywhere, and possibly back into the spacecraft,” he told MailOnline.
Since the samples returned to Earth on Sunday, NASA has only opened the capsule’s top cover, while holding a handful of rocks from Determine stored in other, smaller components inside that must be opened.
The precious cargo is estimated to amount to 8.8 ounces, or 250 grams of rock material, only about half of what you’d find in a standard-sized box of cereal.
But NASA thinks it will be enough to reveal secrets about the composition of asteroids and ‘help us better understand the types of asteroids that could threaten Earth’.
Gravel and dust from Bennu, which may hit Earth in 2182, represents the largest haul from beyond the moon.
In September 2016, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida and only arrived at Bennu in December 2018. After mapping the asteroid for nearly two years, it collected samples from the surface on October 20, 2020 before returning home, via a round trip of 3.86 billion miles.
The plane containing the valuable samples landed on a remote military site in western Utah state on Sunday. Within two hours of landing, the capsule was inside a temporary clean room at the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training and was lifted there by helicopter.
The capsule was then flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where experts wearing protective suits opened the capsule’s initial cap on Tuesday and discovered black dust. “Scientists discovered black dust and debris on the avionics deck of the OSIRIS-REx science tube when the initial cover was removed,” NASA said in a statement.
This operation was carried out in a new laboratory specially designed for the OSIRIS-REx mission. “The aluminum cover has been removed inside the glovebox which is designed to allow working with large hardware.”
In the next few weeks, scientists will disassemble the entire capsule, extract and weigh samples, inventory the rocks and dust, and then distribute pieces of Bennu to scientists around the world.
A quarter of the samples will be given to more than 200 people from 38 institutions spread globally, including a team of scientists from the University of Manchester and the Natural History Museum in London, England.
The analysis will help researchers better understand the formation of the solar system and how Earth became habitable.
This is because space rocks have the potential to provide an idea of what the planets were like at the time of their formation.
2023-10-03 13:30:47
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