NASA has finally unlocked a sample of an asteroid trapped after a jammed latch

(CNN) — NASA announced Thursday that, after a month-long process, a sample of valuable material was finally released from an asteroid.

The space agency has collected about 70 grams of rock and dust from its OSIRIS-REx mission, which traveled nearly 6 billion kilometers to collect this unprecedented sample from a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu.

But NASA revealed in October that some of the material remained out of reach in the capsule hidden inside a tool called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, a robotic arm with a storage container at one end that collected the sample.

According to NASA, the sampler head is held closed by 35 latches, but two of them proved too difficult to open.

Freeing the mechanism is not an easy task. The space agency must use pre-approved materials and equipment around the capsule to minimize the risk of damaging or contaminating samples.

These “new instruments also had to operate in the tight space of the glove compartment, which limited their height, weight and possible bow movements,” said Dr. OSIRIS-REx Defense Chief at the Space Center. Nicole Lunning explains. statement. Johnson of NASA in Houston. “The healing team showed impressive resilience and did an incredible job removing these stubborn fasteners from TAGSAM’s head so we could continue disassembly. We are delighted with the success.”

To fix the problem, NASA said two tools were made from surgical steel, “the hardest metal approved for use in a pristine healing glove box.”

Before tackling the stuck fasteners, a team at the Johnson Space Center tested the tools in a “test lab,” gradually increasing the applied torque to ensure the new tools could successfully remove solid fasteners.

Here’s what asteroid samples have revealed so far

On Thursday afternoon, NASA reported that the material trapped in the sample had not yet been released. According to the space agency, “a few additional disassembly steps remain.” After completing those steps, the hidden cache can be photographed, removed and weighed, NASA said.

An analysis of Bennu material collected last fall by NASA researchers has already found that the asteroid samples contain abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals as well as carbon.

Scientists believe that signs of water on asteroids support the current theory of how it reached Earth billions of years ago.

“The reason Earth is a habitable world is because we have oceans and lakes and rivers and rain because these clay minerals came to Earth 4 billion to 4.5 billion years ago, making our world habitable,” he said in October. . -REx Principal Investigator Dante Loretta. “So we’re looking at ways to incorporate water into solid materials.” Lauretta is Professor of Planetary Science and Cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona.

Some of the previously collected Bennu samples have been hermetically sealed in storage containers for future study for decades, according to a NASA press release on Thursday.