This is the best summary I could come up with:
Curators at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston have said they are “overjoyed” to have finally got a canister of asteroid dust open, four months after it parachuted down through the Earth’s atmosphere into the Utah desert.
The space administration announced Friday that it had successfully removed two stuck fasteners that had prevented some of the samples collected in 2020 from the 4.6bn-year-old asteroid Bennu, which is classified as a “potentially hazardous” because it has one in 1,750 chance of crashing into Earth by 2300.
Most of the rock samples collected by Nasa’s Osiris-Rex mission were retrieved soon after the canister landed in September, but additional material remaining inside a sampler head that proved difficult to access.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the team designed custom tools made from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel to pry it open – all without the samples being contaminated by Earthly air.
“Samples from asteroids [such as this] tell us what all those ingredients were for making a planet like the Earth and they also tell us what the recipe was – so how did those materials come together and start mixing together to end up with [habitable environments]?” King added.
The billion-dollar spacecraft that collected the sample from Bennu, a space rock from the earliest days of the solar system, and released a canister toward Earth is now heading to a peanut-shaped asteroid named Apophis.
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 236 words. Saved 45%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Is it possible for any user to call this bot to summarize an article?
For the others who asked the same question as me of “how did they know the canister was valued 1 billion?”, the title was amended. The space craft that sent the capsule is worth the 1 billion.
