NASA Finally Opens the OSIRIS-REx Sample Container

Remember this?  I almost didn't.   Back on September 24, the return capsule from the OSIRIS-REx satellite landed in the Utah desert, carrying samples from Asteroid Bennu.  As soon as four days later, they announced they had opened the satellite and started recovering the samples.

Except that they didn't.  The story emerged later that there was more material in the sample container, but they couldn't get to it because there were a two screws that were stuck and couldn't be removed.  The samples they obtained were from the outside of that sample container.  Two fasteners out of 35.

Pause for a moment so everyone who has ever tried to take literally anything apart to work on can silently think, "there's always at least one fastener that gives you hell."  It's always the last the one because you end up leaving it for last.  

On January 10, NASA technicians finally got those fasteners out.  

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx curation engineer, Neftali Hernandez, attaches one of the tools developed to help remove two final fasteners that prohibited complete disassembly of the TAGSAM (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) head that holds the remainder of material collected from asteroid Bennu. (Image credit: NASA with the warning that I ran it in my photo editor to make it bigger than the image on Space.com and it improved the exposure)

With the fasteners finally removed, the astromaterials curation team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston will proceed with disassembling the TAGSAM head to access the remaining asteroid material. This material includes dust and rocks of up to about 0.4 inches (one cm) in size. The final mass of the sample will be determined in the coming weeks.

NASA plans to release a catalog of all the Bennu samples later this year, which will enable scientists and institutions worldwide to submit requests for research or display, opening up new avenues of scientific exploration.

Looks like a custom tool produced for this job.  Again, it's not like fasteners being stuck is an unusual problem. 

The probe formerly known as OSIRIS-REx continued its mission after jettisoning the TAGSAM container.  We've covered this before, but the satellite changed its course to embark on a five-year journey to study the asteroid Apophis as it approaches our planet for a close flyby April 13,2029.  OSIRIS-REx has been renamed OSIRIS-APEX for that mission.  

Apophis is named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos, and for those not familiar with the story, there's a very healthy mythology that has grown up around the idea that Apophis is going to hit Earth in 2029.  NASA says that after very high resolution observations of the asteroid on its last pass by Earth in 2021, the confidence is very high that it won't hit Earth.  Apophis’ orbit will bring it within 20,000 miles of Earth’s surface.  That's closer to Earth than the satellites in the geosynchronous orbit but above everything in lower orbits, which is the majority.  Appropriately for an asteroid named after the god of chaos, true believers say, "of course, that's what they would want you to believe."