University of Arizona, Tucson
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Goes for Early Stow of Asteroid Sample
Grey Hautaluoma / Alana Johnson
Headquarters, Washington
Nancy Neal Jones
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Erin Morton
University of Arizona, Tucson

Credits: NASA/University of Arizona, Tucson
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is ready to perform an early stow on Tuesday, Oct. 27, of the large sample it collected last week from the surface of the asteroid Bennu to protect and return as much of the sample as possible.
On Oct. 22, the OSIRIS-REx mission team received images that showed the spacecraft’s collector head overflowing with material collected from Bennu’s surface – well over the two-ounce (60-gram) mission requirement – and that some of these particles appeared to be slowly escaping from the collection head, called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM).
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