NASA Is Struggling To Open Its Asteroid Sample Container

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

About a month ago, pristine samples from an asteroid landed on Earth while enclosed within a tight capsule. The sample canister was designed to keep the main chunk of the asteroid safe during its journey through space, but now teams at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) are struggling to open it to get at the space rocks.

For the past week, the curation team for the OSIRIS-REx mission has been having a hard time opening the TAGSAM head, a round sampler head at the end of an articulated arm on the spacecraft that was used to grab the sample from the asteroid. The TAGSAM head (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) is where the bulk of the asteroid sample is, and it is therefore being carefully handled by members of the team through a specialized glovebox under the flow of nitrogen to prevent contamination.

After multiple attempts at removal, the team discovered two of the 35 fasteners on the TAGSAM head could not be removed with the current tools approved for use in the OSIRIS-REx glovebox," NASA wrote in a blog post on Friday. The team has been working to develop and implement new approaches to extract the material inside the head, while continuing to keep the sample safe and pristine."

When the aluminum lid to the sample canister was first removed, the mission team found black dust and debris on the avionics deck of the canister. On October 11, NASA revealed the first look at the samples collected from the outside of the TAGSAM head while adding that it still hasn't opened the sample canister yet. The only problem is a great problem and that's we've found a lot more sample than we're anticipating before even getting into the TAGSAM," Francis McCubbin, curator at NASA's JSC, said during a live event.

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