Asteroid samples sealed in OSIRIS-REx return capsule – Spaceflight Now

A collection chamber that could contain more than 2 pounds of samples gathered from an asteroid in deep space last week has been sealed inside of a return capsule on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to bring the extraterrestrial specimens back to Earth in 2023, officials announced Thursday.

The sample return capsule closed its heat shield to seal up the asteroid specimens late Wednesday, completing steps to place the collection device at the end of a robotic arm inside the module that will protect the rock and soil during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Mission managers accelerated plans to stow the sample inside the return capsule after finding that asteroid particles were escaping from the collection chamber last week. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft descended to a precise touch-and-go landing on asteroid Bennu Oct. 20 to gather the surface specimens.

NASA officials announced Thursday that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft secured the asteroid material inside the sample return capsule more than 200 million miles (330 million kilometers) from Earth.

“We were originally planning to do that stow operation next week, and we’re here to announce today that we have successfully completed that operation,” said Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“This achievement by OSIRIS-REx on behalf of NASA and the world has lifted our vision to the higher things we can achieve together, as teams and nations,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in a statement. “Together a team comprising industry, academia and international partners, and a talented and diverse team of NASA employees with all types of expertise, has put us on course to vastly increase our collection on Earth of samples from space.

“Samples like this are going to transform what we know about our universe and ourselves, which is at the base of all NASA’s endeavors,” Bridenstine said in a statement.

Imagery of OSIRIS-REx’s Touch And Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM, after the spacecraft’s brief landing on Bennu showed the collection chamber overflowing with material scooped up from the asteroid. The TAGSAM’s 11-foot-tall (3.4-meter) robotic arm contacted Bennu for about six seconds, and the device fired a bottle of compressed nitrogen gas to help blow soil and rock particles into the sampling system.

It turned out the system gathered so much sample that five small rocks jammed into the opening of the collection chamber, preventing its mylar seal from closing. The images of the TAGSAM head last week showed particles escaping, and officials decided to skip plans to move the robotic arm and put the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft into a spin to measure the probe’s moment of inertia, yielding an estimate of how much mass of sample the mission got from Bennu.

Managers worried the robotic arm maneuvers required for the sample mass measurement would…