NASA robotic arm overflowing with spoils of asteroid Bennu theft - CNET

NASA bumped into a space rock this week and collected so much of it that larger rocks seemed to fail to make it all the way inside its spacecraft's sampling arm.

The spacecraft's sampling arm, called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, over the target sample site during a dress rehearsal in April. .

NASA's asteroid-chaser Osiris-Rex completed a key part of its mission this week by managing to nab some rocks from the surface of the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu, NASA reported Friday.

The spacecraft traveled over 200 million miles and four years to briefly bump into Bennu, blast it with compressed gas and collect bits of its surface.

NASA TV reported Tuesday that the spacecraft's robotic sampling arm, named Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism,  or Tagsam, did touch down on Bennu.

The spacecraft, which operates largely autonomously due to the 18-minute communications delay with mission control on Earth, fired a canister of gas through Tagsam that disrupted the surface of Bennu and forced a sample into the arm's collector head. .

22, this series of three images shows the sampler head on Osiris-Rex is full of rocks and dust collected from the surface of Bennu.

It reported on Friday that it believes Osiris-Rex collected a sufficient sample and moved to begin to stow it quickly, skipping a planned sample mass measurement and canceling a braking burn to keep acceleration of the spacecraft to a minimum