NASA finally unlocks trapped asteroid model after jammed latches

(CNN) — After a month-long process, a sample of valuable material from an asteroid has finally been released, NASA announced Thursday.

The space agency has already collected about 70 grams of rock and dust from its OSIRIS-REx mission, which traveled nearly 6 billion kilometers to collect this unprecedented sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.

But NASA revealed in October that some items were out of reach in the capsule hidden inside a tool called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, a robotic arm with a storage container at one end that collects the sample.

According to NASA, the sampler head was covered by 35 latches, but two of them were very difficult to open.

Freeing the mechanism is not an easy task. To minimize the risk of damaging or contaminating the samples, the space agency must use pre-approved materials and equipment around the capsule.

The OSIRIS-REx security team appeared on January 10 to try to remove one of the latches preventing the touch-and-go sample acquisition mechanism's sample header, or TAGSAM, from fully opening. The instrument contained extra material from the asteroid Bennu. (Credit: Robert Markowitz/NASA)

These “new instruments had to work in the tight space of a glove box, which limited their height, weight and possible movement of the bow,” explains Dr. Nicole Luning, head of OSIRIS-REx security at the space center. Johnson of NASA in Houston. “The curing team showed impressive resilience and did an incredible job removing these stubborn fasteners from the TAGSAM head so we could continue extraction. We are delighted with the win.”

To fix the problem, NASA said two tools were created from surgical steel, “a hard metal that has been approved for use in fancy healing glove boxes.”

Before tackling the stuck fasteners, a team at Johnson Space Center tested the tools in a “test lab,” slowly increasing the applied torque to ensure the new tools could successfully remove the inflexible fasteners.

What the asteroid sample has revealed so far

As of Thursday afternoon, NASA said the material trapped in the sample had not yet been revealed. According to the space agency, “there are some additional extraction steps. After completing those steps, the hidden cache can be photographed, extracted and weighed,” according to NASA.

Analysis of Bennu material collected by NASA researchers last fall has already revealed abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals and carbon in samples of the asteroid.

Scientists believe that signs of water in meteorites reinforce the current theory of how it reached Earth billions of years ago.

“The reason Earth is a habitable world is that we have oceans, lakes, rivers and rain because these clay minerals landed on Earth 4 billion to 4.5 billion years ago, making our world habitable,” he said. OSIRIS -REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta in October. “So we're looking at the way water is incorporated into the solid.” Lauretta is Professor of Planetary Science and Cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona.

Previously collected Bennu samples have been hermetically sealed in storage containers for decades for future study, a NASA press release said Thursday.