NASA experts have opened a container with asteroid dust worth a billion dollars

“Out of my mind from happiness”

Curators at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston said they were “overjoyed” to finally open a container of asteroid dust, four months after it parachuted through Earth’s atmosphere into the Utah desert.

Scientists at the Johnson Space Center have opened the remaining samples of the 4.6 billion-year-old asteroid Bennu, collected by the Osiris-Rex mission, writes The Guardian.

The US space agency announced on Friday that it had successfully removed two stuck fasteners that had interfered with some samples collected in 2020 from the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu, which is classified as “potentially hazardous” because it has a one in 1,750 chance of collide with Earth by 2300.

Most of the rock samples collected by NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission were recovered shortly after the container landed in September, but additional material remained inside the sampler head that proved difficult to access.

After months of struggling with the last two of the 35 fasteners, scientists in Houston were able to remove them. “It’s open! It’s open!” – NASA’s Planetary Science Division posted this message on Twitter/X. The unit also released a photo of dust and small rocks inside the container.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the team developed special tools made from a special grade of surgical-grade, non-magnetic stainless steel to open the container—all without contaminating the samples with terrestrial air. NASA said it will now analyze the 9-ounce sample.

“These are some of the oldest materials formed in our solar system,” Ashley King of London’s Natural History Museum said last year.

“Samples from asteroids like this tell us what all these ingredients were to create a planet like Earth, and they also tell us what the recipe was – so how did these materials come together and start mixing to end up making a planet like Earth? life environment?” Ashley King added.

The billion-dollar spacecraft that collected a sample from Bennu, a space rock from the solar system’s earliest days, and released the container toward Earth is now heading toward a peanut-shaped asteroid called Apophis.

For a time, astronomers thought Apophis might be on a collision course with planet Earth, but those fears have subsided and scientists expect it to pass closer to Earth in 2029 than any object of its size has ever passed.

After the curation team managed to open the capsule and retrieve the remaining material, Eileen Stansbury, head of Ares (Astromaterials Research and Exploration Sciences) at Johnson, said they were “all excited to see the remaining treasures that Osiris-Rex holds.”

Dr. Nicole Lanning, curator of Osiris-Rex at Johnson, said in a statement: “The curation team demonstrated impressive resilience and did an incredible job of removing these stubborn attachments from the TAGSAM head so we could continue disassembly. We are very pleased with the success.”