Securing the sample
As soon as the capsule touches down, OSIRIS-REx personnel will spring into action from a nearby hangar, riding four helicopters to the landing site.
The first person to approach the sample capsule will be a military representative who will make sure the area is safe by checking for any unexploded ordnance. A representative from Lockheed Martin will check the capsule’s temperature to ensure it has cooled off from its fiery descent.
The OSIRIS-REx team will take samples of the soil and air at the landing site. These will be vital later if scientists detect the molecular precursors to life in the Bennu samples. By comparing these important findings with sample site readings, the team can ensure the samples don’t contain Earthly contaminants.
Two team members will lift the capsule, which weighs about 45 kilograms (100 pounds), into a metal crate. They will wrap the crate in protective Teflon and a tarp before bundling the whole thing into a harness. A helicopter will hook onto the harness and transport it to a temporary clean room in a nearby hangar. There, technicians will delicately open the sample capsule and extract the small canister containing the precious Bennu samples.
The canister will be stored under a nitrogen purge to protect it from contamination. On Sept. 25, the day after landing, the samples will be flown to a special curation lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. JSC’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division, which hosts numerous other Solar System samples, will oversee initial curation of the OSIRIS-REx samples.
The sample canister will be placed inside a special nitrogen glovebox and opened roughly 10 days after arrival at JSC. NASA says it will reveal the samples to the public on Oct. 11.