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Scientists said: A NASA spacecraft more than 200 million kilometers away has hidden samples of an asteroid in a capsule to return to Earth, after losing some of its precious catch.
Flight controllers triggered the crucial process after some of the samples taken were dumped into space last week.
The “Osiris-Rex” spacecraft collected pebbles and other pieces from the asteroid Bennu, nicknamed “Doomsday Rock” on October 20, by briefly touching the surface with its robotic arm and grabbing anything in it. found. Such an amount was collected – around hundreds of grams – that rocks were trapped in the edge of the container and split open, allowing some of the samples to fall, according to Sky News Arabia.
This is the first US mission to search for asteroid samples, and Japan has done so twice in other space rocks, and it expects its last batch to arrive in December.
Bennu, orbiting the sun and rich in carbon, is believed to contain the preserved building blocks of the solar system.
Scientists said: The samples can help explain how the planets in our solar system formed billions of years ago and how life originated on Earth.
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