2023-09-29 10:21:04
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[EN VIDÉO] Osiris-Rex says goodbye to Bennu The mission of Osiris-Rex (Nasa) was to collect rock samples from the surface of…
The Osiris-Rex capsule returned to Earth this Sunday, carrying samples from the surface of Bennu. It is currently in safekeeping at the Osiris-RexOsiris-Rex Mission Preservation Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, where NASA is keeping it in a specially designed clean room.
Operations to open the capsule began with the removal of the heat shield, revealing the container housing the Bennu samples. This “container” is actually the sample acquisition mechanism Touch and Go (Tagsam) used in October 2020 to recover material from the asteroid’s surface.
A dark dust that is not enigmatic
When opening the capsule “lid”, some people were surprised to find dust surrounding the mechanism. This dark dust obviously does not come from the sand of the Utah desert where the capsule landed on Sunday following seven years in space! This is dust from the asteroid Bennu, which will be analyzed in the coming days to confirm its origin. It should be noted that it neither “leaked” nor escaped from the Tagsam housing the samples, the mechanism being particularly robust and complex to open, thus guaranteeing watertightness.
To understand the presence of this dust outside the sample acquisition mechanism, simply refer to the explanations from the University of Arizona on the mission’s website. These explanations specify that during the maneuver Touch and Go, the outer contact surfaces of the mechanism can collect fine-grained materials without them being trapped inside the mechanism. The trapped materials are those recovered during contact with the ground, when nitrogen gas was released to raise dust and very small pebbles, which were then captured inside the Tagsam.
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