NASA Comet Probe Spewing Contents Of Sample Back Into Space – IOTW Report

NASA Comet Probe Spewing Contents Of Sample Back Into Space

US News & World Report

The U.S. probe that collected a sample from an asteroid earlier this week retrieved so much material that a rock is wedged in the container door, allowing rocks to spill back out into space, NASA officials said on Friday.

The robotic arm of the probe, OSIRIS-REx, on Tuesday night kicked up a debris cloud of rocks on Bennu, a skyscraper-sized asteroid some 200 million miles (320 million km) from Earth and trapped the material in a collection device for the return to Earth.

But images of the spacecraft’s collection head beamed back to ground control revealed it had caught more material than scientists anticipated and was spewing an excess of flaky asteroid rocks into space. More

9 Comments on NASA Comet Probe Spewing Contents Of Sample Back Into Space

  1. Wow, this was an incredible achievement. They intercepted and parked their tin can on an asteroid traveling at a bazillion miles an hour. Landed for a millisecond, made a big old scoop, and split. An incredible amount of engineering. Computer clocking speed alone has got to be jaw dropping. Thrust vectors in zero gravity. Gives my mind a charlie horse just thinking about it. And some dumb asshole forgot to figure out how to close the garbage can lid. I bet he’s not getting any bonuses this year.

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