The OSIRIS-REx curation team is a winner of the 2024 Gizmodo Science Fair for safeguarding pristine samples of an asteroid delivered to Earth. When two fasteners got stuck on the canister containing pieces of asteroid Bennu, NASA’s specialized team developed new tools to access the sample. Their meticulous work ensured that planetary contaminants didn’t spoil the ancient rock, preserving its embedded clues to the solar system’s origins.
The question
Can scientists retrieve evidence for the building blocks of life preserved within asteroid samples, without Earthly contaminants getting in the way?
The results
The OSIRIS-REx mission launched in September 2016 and reached a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu in December 2018. After nearly two years of observations, the spacecraft landed on the asteroid and snagged a sample from its surface. Collecting bits of an asteroid was a complex task, but other challenges awaited.
© Vicky Leta/Gizmodo
The truly tedious work began in September 2023, when a canister containing rock and debris from the asteroid made a parachute-assisted landing in the Utah desert. Ground teams moved swiftly to retrieve it and transport it to a clean room, where it was connected to a continuous flow of nitrogen. The nitrogen purge, as scientists call it, is designed to prevent Earthly contaminants getting anywhere near the pieces of Bennu, ensuring the sample remains pure for scientific analysis.
There was one problem, however: The TAGSAM head (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism), where the bulk of the asteroid sample is stored, was stuck. The mission returned to Earth with about 250 grams of asteroid, plus another 70 grams in bonus material found outside of the sample container. However, two of the 35 fasteners on the TAGSAM head could not be removed with the pre-approved tools for use in the OSIRIS-REx glovebox, blocking mission teams from accessing the precious material inside.
Photo: NASA/Keegan Barber
In November 2023, the curation team began developing new tools that could fit inside the specialized glovebox; it took two months, but the engineers were finally able to remove two pesky fasteners from the sampler head with the help of the new tools.
Why they did it
This was NASA’s first mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid in space. The goal was to return material untouched by Earth’s atmosphere. That’s why, once the asteroid sample reached Earth, safeguarding it became the mission’s top priority.
“It’s a two-phase approach; as far as retrieving the sample, there’s the procedure for disassembling the tags, which is a very complicated mechanism, and the other approach is making sure you have the right tools and the right equipment to help you do that,” said Salvador Martinez, OSIRIS-REx lead technology development engineer. “Our engineering team was looking at the process and then developing any hardware…making prototypes, going through testing and evaluating how things worked, making sure that we gave them all the equipment that we think was needed.”
“Before the sample gets here, you prepare as much as you possibly can, and as we know, things come back from space and there’s always a huge degree of uncertainty with some of these things,” he added.
Meteorites that fall to Earth on their own are contaminated by the process, and it becomes hard to trace their source in the vast cosmos. With the Bennu sample, scientists created an opportunity to examine a space rock as though it was still out there. That’s where the curation team came in.
“Our primary goal is protecting the sample,” said Nicole Lunning, lead OSIRIS-REx sample curator. “A lot of what we did in our rehearsals for developing a procedure of how we were going to take the tags apart was focused on protecting the sample that was inside of it, so that we could minimize that these rocks might be broken or spilled.”
It’s easy to come up with different tools to loosen up the faulty fasteners, but the trick is doing it without threatening the integrity of the sample.
“That was actually fairly complicated, because I know from the outside, a lot of people see the TAGSAM head and it’s not that hard to take apart if you don’t care about spilling what’s inside or protecting what’s inside,” Lunning said. “And that’s the really big challenge for us.”
Why they’re a winner
Prior to the sample touchdown, the curation team went through hundreds of rehearsals. Team members had been worried about the possibility of a stuck sample head and tried to prepare for it as much as possible. Since this had never been done before, however, there were so many unknowns.
Bennu is a small, near-Earth asteroid that makes a close pass to Earth every six years or so. The asteroid may have broken off from a much larger carbon-rich space rock about 700 million to 2 billion years ago and drifted much closer to Earth since then. The $1.16 billion OSIRIS-REx mission was extremely complicated from the get-go, and it had now come down to two fasteners. The curation team tasked with retrieving the sample was faced with an immense challenge: get the Bennu bits out without compromising the whole mission.
Scientists performed an early analysis of the asteroid sample and found an abundance of carbon and water molecules, supporting the theory that the building blocks of life may have made their way to Earth via space rock impacts. There’s still plenty more of Bennu to be analyzed.
What’s next
“After we got those fasteners removed, it was a little bit like time traveling back to where we expected to have been in late October,” Lunning said. “We had all this equipment and other things stockpiled and cleaned that had been sitting ready, and so we sort of got back on the track that we’re expecting to be on.”
The returned asteroid pieces are being divided among a sample analysis team of 230 global scientists for a deep dive into Bennu’s composition.
Now that the sample is in the hands of the processing team, the curation team can look back at the process and try to figure out exactly why those fasteners were stuck. The infamous fasteners are part of the mission’s returned flight hardware collection, and they’ll serve as a way to study the mission for future applications.
The team
Nicole Lunning, OSIRIS-REx curator at Johnson Space Center; Kevin Righter, OSIRIS-REx deputy curation lead; Christopher Snead, deputy sample curator at Johnson Space Center; Kimberly Allums, curation project lead for OSIRIS-REx and the section manager for curation; Melissa Rodriguez, contractor lead for NASA’s astromaterials collections; Rachel Funk, OSIRIS-REx lab lead processor; Salvador Martinez, lead astromaterials curation engineer for OSIRIS-REx; Neftali Hernandez, astromaterials curation engineer for OSIRIS-REx; Gabriel Lugo, astromaterials curation engineer for OSIRIS-REx; Wayland Connelly, astromaterials curation engineer; Julia Plummer, a small particles processor supporting OSIRIS-REx; Mari Montoya, OSIRIS-REx astromaterials particles processor; Jannatul Ferdous, astromaterials processor supporting OSIRIS-REx; Curtis Calva, astromaterials processor supporting OSIRIS-REx; Carla Gonzalez, astromaterials processor supporting OSIRIS-REx.
Click here to see all of the winners of the 2024 Gizmodo Science Fair.
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