Asteroid samples escaping from jammed NASA spacecraft

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA spacecraft is stuffed with so much
asteroid rubble from this week’s grab that it’s jammed open and
precious particles are drifting away in space, scientists said Friday.

Scientists
announced the news three days after the spacecraft named Osiris-Rex
briefly touched asteroid Bennu, NASA’s first attempt at such a mission.

The
mission’s lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona,
said Tuesday’s operation 200 million miles away collected far more
material than expected for return to Earth — in the hundreds of grams.
The sample container on the end of the robot arm penetrated so deeply
into the asteroid and with such force, however, that rocks got sucked in
and became wedged around the rim of the lid.

Scientists estimate the sampler pressed as much as 19 inches (48 centimeters) into the rough, crumbly, black terrain.

“We’re almost a victim of our own success here,” Lauretta said at a hastily arranged news conference.

Lauretta
said there is nothing flight controllers can do to clear the
obstructions and prevent more bits of Bennu from escaping, other than to
get the samples into their return capsule as soon as possible.

So,
the flight team was scrambling to put the sample container into the
capsule as early as Tuesday — much sooner than originally planned — for
the long trip home.

“Time is of the essence,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, chief of NASA’s science missions.

This
is NASA’s first asteroid sample-return mission. Bennu was chosen
because its carbon-rich material is believed to hold the preserved
building blocks of our solar system. Getting pieces from this cosmic
time capsule could help scientists better understand how the planets
formed billions of years ago and how life originated on Earth.

Scientists
were stunned — and then dismayed — on Thursday when they saw the
pictures coming from Osiris-Rex following its wildly successful
touch-and-go at Bennu two days earlier.

A cloud of asteroid
particles could be seen swirling around the spacecraft as it backed away
from Bennu. The situation appeared to stabilize, according to Lauretta,
once the robot arm was locked into place. But it was impossible to know
exactly how much had already been lost.

The requirement for the $800 million-plus mission was to bring back a minimum 2 ounces (60 grams).

Regardless
of what’s on board, Osiris-Rex will still leave the vicinity of the
asteroid in March — that’s the earliest possible departure given the
relative locations of Earth and Bennu. The samples won’t make it back
until 2023, seven years after the spacecraft rocketed away from Cape
Canaveral.

Osiris-Rex will keep drifting away from Bennu and will not orbit it again, as it waits for its scheduled departure.

Because
of the sudden turn of events, scientists won’t know how much the sample
capsule holds until it’s back on Earth. They initially planned to spin
the spacecraft to measure the contents, but that maneuver was canceled
since it could spill even more debris.

“I think we’re going to
have to wait until we get home to know precisely how much we have,”
Lauretta told reporters. “As you can imagine, that’s hard. … But the
good news is we see a lot of material.”

Japan, meanwhile, is awaiting its second batch of samples taken from a different asteroid, due back in December.