December 5, 2024

Brighton Journal

Complete News World

NASA is working to recover a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid sample from the container

NASA is working to recover a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid sample from the container

NASA scientists successfully returned an asteroid sample to Earth in September, making them the first US space agency to do so.

All they have to do now is figure out how to open the touch-and-go sample acquisition mechanism, or TAGSAM, to retrieve the rest of the sample, according to NASA.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft logged about seven years of travel, surveying and collecting samples from asteroid Bennu before returning to Earth on September 24, 2023.

“Scientists hope to Pino sample NASA wrote on its website that the “OSIRIS-REx” that was dropped in the Utah desert will provide clues about whether asteroids that collided with Earth billions of years ago brought water and other key components of life here.