The NASA restoration group started by taking samples of the desert floor and environment the place the capsule landed. Then they gingerly loaded it onto a helicopter and transported it to a short lived clear room in a hangar on the coaching vary. Within the clear room, personnel wore bunny suits overlaying their clothes, sneakers, and hair to make sure that material fibers, hair, and pores and skin cells didn’t contaminate the container. They opened the highest of the capsule and carried out a nitrogen purge, pumping in fuel to ensure that contaminants like oxygen, moisture, and earthly micro organism don’t someway make their method inside.
On Monday, they flew the partially opened capsule on a Boeing transport plane to a clear room at Johnson Area Heart’s curation facility. There they will proceed taking aside the capsule over the subsequent few days. The inside canister shall be moved to a “glovebox,” a sealed container full of hydrogen that technicians can entry solely by sticking their gloved fingers by a partition. They will even take away the collector head of the robotic arm that snagged the pattern and place it in one other devoted glovebox.
On October 11, NASA plans a public reveal of what’s contained in the canister. Whereas it is going to take a while to do in-depth research of that predominant pattern, the reveal might embrace Haenecour’s group’s preliminary findings about mud particles on the canister’s exterior. This mud would have hooked up to the container in 2020, when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft grabbed the pattern—and nearly spilled it into space.
Curation groups course of the pattern return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in a cleanroom.{Photograph}: Keegan Barber/NASA
As soon as the canister is lastly opened, the curatorial group at Johnson plans to divvy up the precious rocks amongst some 200 scientists worldwide. “These samples are a tremendous treasure trove for generations of scientists,” mentioned Eileen Stansbury, a chief scientist at Johnson, throughout Sunday’s information convention. If all goes effectively, these samples will final for many years and can be utilized as new evaluation instruments are developed. (A half century after the Apollo program, scientists are nonetheless doing analysis utilizing lunar regolith samples, like for a latest examine about growing plants on the moon.)
OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first asteroid pattern return, and the capsule is predicted to harbor a a lot bigger pattern than these introduced again by the Japanese house company’s Hayabusa missions, which visited the asteroids Ryugu and Itokawa.
NASA has extra sample-return tasks within the works. That features collaborating with Japan’s MMX mission, which is able to launch subsequent 12 months to go to the Martian moon Phobos and return a pattern in 2029. NASA will even use the Artemis program’s deliberate lunar touchdown in 2026 to dig up new moon samples, and the company intends to convey again regolith from Mars, which is being collected by the Perseverance rover.
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