This spherical container has been engineered to house the most scientifically valuable cargo imaginable: samples brought back from the Red Planet. Still probably many years in the future and most ...

NASA has collected a small amount of the rock and dust sample that its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft brought back from the asteroid Bennu. However, it is having a bit of trouble accessing the rest. That's ...

Click to open image viewer. All of the Apollo lunar landing missions were equipped with containers specially designed to isolate small rock or soil samples from possible contamination during transfer ...

You’d think grabbing a scoop of dirt off an orbiting space rock and then delivering it back to Earth would be the most complicated part of an asteroid sample collection mission, but the real challenge ...

We mentioned yesterday the Japanese Hayabusa2 probe was set to return its samples to Earth. That sample return happened near Woomera in Australia and went perfectly. JAXA has announced the capsule ...

Teams of researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center located in Houston, Texas, have finally removed the lid containing the space agency's first collected asteroid samples. Back in October last year, ...

NASA has revealed that it has already processed 70.3 grams of rocks and dust collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission from asteroid Bennu. That means the mission has way exceeded its goal of bringing 60 ...

About a month ago, pristine samples from an asteroid landed on Earth while enclosed within a tight capsule. The sample canister was designed to keep the main chunk of the asteroid safe during its ...