The NASA restoration group started through taking samples of the barren region flooring and surroundings the place the tablet landed. Then they gingerly loaded it onto a helicopter and transported it to a short lived blank room in a hangar at the coaching vary. Within the blank room, workforce wore bunny fits masking their clothes, footwear, and hair to be sure that material fibers, hair, and pores and skin cells didn’t contaminate the container. They opened the highest of the tablet and carried out a nitrogen purge, pumping in fuel to make certain that contaminants like oxygen, moisture, and earthly micro organism don’t by hook or by crook make their approach inside of.
On Monday, they flew the partly opened tablet on a Boeing shipping plane to a blank room at Johnson House Heart’s curation facility. There they will proceed taking aside the tablet over the following couple of days. The inner canister shall be moved to a “glovebox,” a sealed container stuffed with hydrogen that technicians can get right of entry to best through sticking their gloved fingers via a partition. They are going to additionally take away the collector head of the robot arm that snagged the pattern and position it in every other devoted glovebox.
On October 11, NASA plans a public disclose of what’s throughout the canister. Whilst it’ll take a little time to do in-depth research of that major pattern, the disclose would possibly come with Haenecour’s group’s initial findings about mud debris at the canister’s external. This mud would have hooked up to the container in 2020, when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft grabbed the pattern—and just about spilled it into area.
Curation groups procedure the pattern go back tablet from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx undertaking in a cleanroom.{Photograph}: Keegan Barber/NASA
As soon as the canister is in the end opened, the curatorial group at Johnson plans to divvy up the dear rocks amongst some 200 scientists international. “Those samples are an incredible treasure trove for generations of scientists,” stated Eileen Stansbury, a prime scientist at Johnson, all over Sunday’s information convention. If all is going smartly, the ones samples will closing for many years and can be utilized as new research gear are evolved. (A part century after the Apollo program, scientists are nonetheless doing analysis the usage of lunar regolith samples, like for a up to date find out about about rising crops at the moon.)
OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first asteroid pattern go back, and the tablet is anticipated to harbor a miles higher pattern than the ones introduced again through the Eastern area company’s Hayabusa missions, which visited the asteroids Ryugu and Itokawa.
NASA has extra sample-return initiatives within the works. That incorporates participating with Japan’s MMX undertaking, which is able to release subsequent 12 months to consult with the Martian moon Phobos and go back a pattern in 2029. NASA can even use the Artemis program’s deliberate lunar touchdown in 2026 to dig up new moon samples, and the company intends to carry again regolith from Mars, which is being amassed through the Perseverance rover.
