2023-09-26 18:25:47
MADRID, 26 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
NASA plans to present on October 11 the Initial findings of rock and dust brought back from asteroid Bennuin addition to the first images of the show.
The precious 250 gram cargo delivered by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to Earth September 24is now in its final home at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it will be cared for, stored and distributed to scientists around the world.
A specialized team will spend the next few weeks in Johnson’s clean room built exclusively for Bennu samples. The clean room includes custom glove boxes built to fit the sample container containing the TAGSAM (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) head inside, NASA reports.
The TAGSAM head was on the end of a robotic arm that collected rocks and dust from the surface of the asteroid Bennu on October 20, 2020.
Having practiced these procedures for months, scientists and technicians plan to follow the numerous steps to extract the TAGSAM sample. First, they plan to put the boat in the glove compartment and take it apart. Next, they plan to remove the head from TAGSAM, where scientists expect most of the samples to be, cataloging and storing every piece of hardware and asteroid dust found outside of it.
Researchers plan to analyze asteroid dust from the initial disassembly to get an early idea of the chemical, mineralogical and physical characteristics and the types of rocks that can be found in the massive sample.
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