When you are firing a spacecraft at an asteroid, touching the spacecraft down on that asteroid very briefly to collect a sample, and then returning the sample to Earth, there are a lot of opportunities for problems.

Despite the difficulty of the task, NASA successfully returned a sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth in late September. Since then, scientists have begun to open the sample, a long, slow, and delicate process, which the team has spent months rehearsing. 

Inside, they have hit a problem, slowing down the process even further.

^{How the sample was collected. Doesn't look easy, does it?}

When they removed the outer lid of the capsule, they found "black dust and debris" coating the lid and the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM). A lot of it.

“The very best ‘problem’ to have is that there is so much material, it’s taking longer than we expected to collect it,” deputy OSIRIS-REx curation lead Christopher Snead said in a statement. “There’s a lot of abundant material outside the TAGSAM head that’s interesting in its own right. It’s really spectacular to have all that material there.”

An abundance of material is, of course, a good thing for the mission, even if it takes a little longer to collect and analyze. The samples will now be analyzed in a variety of ways, including with a scanning electron microscope, infrared measurements, and x-ray diffraction, according to NASA.

“We have all the microanalytical techniques that we can throw at this to really, really tear it apart," Lindsay Keller, an OSIRIS-REx sample analysis team member, added. "Almost down to the atomic scale."

[H/T: BGR]