NASA scientists have finally opened up $1,000,000,000 asteroid

Sometimes a job’s worth taking your time over - you won’t be surprised to hear that’s how NASA tends to operate.

It’s just spent more than three months tinkering carefully with a capsule that came back to Earth containing samples from an asteroid called Bennu.

The material was collected by a mission with the catchy name of OSIRIS-REx, but when stuff like that returns to Earth it’s not just a simple case of whacking it open.

NASA Goddard

Since you need to ensure absolutely no contaminants get into it at all, you have to be really careful with what tools you can use and, in this case, two of the 35 fasteners securing the whole capsule had actually got stuck.

That meant NASA’s team in Houston had to start from the ground up and design completely new tools to get into the capsule without accidentally breaking it apart or ruining what was inside.

As Dr Nicole Lunning, OSIRIS-REx curator at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, puts it: "In addition to the design challenge of being limited to curation-approved materials to protect the scientific value of the asteroid sample, these new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight, and potential arc movement."

That’s a pretty challenging needle to thread, but NASA’s team has finally managed to crack it open (just in a much more technical and high-skill way than that makes it sound).

If you think that means they’re now sifting through all of the rock and dust that came from Bennu, though, think again - this is wildly technical stuff. Instead, they’ve now earned the ability to disassemble the next bit of kit.

This is the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), and inside it they’ll find the main bulk of the samples.

Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebers / NASA

That all sounds like plenty of work already, but Eileen Stansbery, a division chief at Johnson, has helped put it more clearly.

She said: "Our engineers and scientists have worked tirelessly behind the scenes for months to not only process the more than 70g of material we were able to access previously, but also design, develop, and test new tools that allowed us to move past this hurdle.

"The innovation and dedication of this team has been remarkable. We are all excited to see the remaining treasure OSIRIS-REx holds."

This isn’t the only big news in the world of space this week, though - interest is also rapidly gathering around the announcement that scientists have just witnessed the birth of a black hole for the first time.