The NASA spacecraft that has collected pieces of asteroids is losing them to space on its way home

A NASA spaceship that has collected pieces of an asteroid is dumping them into an asteroid on its way home, the space agency said.

The probe has collected a sample consisting of a rock wedged against the container door, meaning they are falling into space.

NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft landed on asteroid Bennu last week, kicking up a cloud of rock debris that was captured in its robotic arm. They will then be transported to Earth for research here.

But NASA announced that it had captured too many rocks and was now working to prevent them from falling into space.

The leak caused the OSIRIS-REx mission team to rush to stow the collection device to prevent further spills.

“Time is of the essence,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, told reporters.

Zurbuchen said mission teams will skip the chance to measure how much material they have collected as originally planned and proceed to the stowage phase, a fragile process of stowing the sample collection container in a safe location inside the spacecraft without pushing out more valuable material.

NASA will not know how much material it has collected until the sample capsule returns in 2023. The troubleshooting has also led mission leaders to forgo further chances of retaking a collection attempt and instead commit to initiating the spacecraft’s return to the Land next March. .

“Honestly, we couldn’t have done a better collection experiment,” Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx, told reporters, saying the sample is large.

But with the door open by a rock and the “troubling” images of sample leaks, “we are almost victims of our success here,” he added.

The $ 800 million minivan-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, was launched in 2016 to capture and return the first U.S. sample of pristine asteroid material. Japan is the only other country to have accomplished such a feat.

Asteroids are among the debris left over from the formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. A sample could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists say.

Additional reporting by Reuters