Posted on 09/24/2023 4:55:24 PM PDT by texas booster
oom
At 12:37 a.m. EDT (10:37 a.m. MDT), a helicopter gently placed NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample capsule, attached to the end of a 100-foot cable, on the ground outside a hangar on the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. Two technicians on the ground helped guide the capsule down.
Once the helicopter line was detached and the helicopter had departed, the clean room team removed the capsule from its metal transport cradle. They loaded the capsule onto a cart and wheeled it into the hangar where a temporary clean room had been set up. In the hangar, the capsule was fully unwrapped and cleaned, and then taken into the clean room for disassembly.
To protect the clean room from contaminants, only six people are allowed inside. Covered from head to toe in bunny suits, hoods, nitrile gloves, shoe covers, plus hair and beard covers, their job is to disassemble the capsule and remove the unopened sample canister inside. They will package all the parts for transport by aircraft to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday morning.
As soon as the disassembly team opens the capsule and removes several components, exposing the unopened sample canister, the plan is to connect the canister to a continuous flow of nitrogen, which will be monitored every hour. Nitrogen is an inert gas that will protect the Bennu sample from oxygen, moisture, and other contaminants; NASA has used nitrogen to protect space samples since the Apollo era.
If clean room staff find loose asteroid particles inside the capsule, they will collect them and place them in aluminum cups for transfer to Johnson.
The disassembly and packaging process is expected to last about five hours, with a clean room technician documenting the process for NASA’s history records.
She was so frickin creepy
I watched it parachute to Earth this morning. Pretty neat.
Man, those government acronym writers pulled off a big one, figuring out how to subtly name the project, “King of the Underworld.” Ya get it? They’re claiming that Satan was the true creator of the Heavens and Earth, along the lines of gnostic Satanism.
>> This is cool as hell <<
Play on words? Osiris, god of the underworld?
It was poorly worded; N2 is relatively inert. It’s inert to be used in fire suppression.
Can’t say that I am fond of that mission’s name.
Set would be closer to what you are looking for. But still not quite there.
Apophis (which is the next asteroid to be sampled by the Osiris) is pretty much what you are looking for. A serpent of darkness and chaos.
And if it hits earth there would be lots of darkness and chaos but looks like that is pretty improbable.
Hope little Billy Gates does not get his hands on the contents. /sarc
Everybody got their squeeze handy...
Nitrogen in the air has triple bond with itself . As such it takes a lot of energy to break it apart. This is why it ends up in explosives so often. The energy it took to make other compounds is released when Nitrogen returns to its original triple bond . The German Chemist who figured out how to turn Nitrogen in the air into ammonia probably saved millions of lives because of the artificial fertilizer this helped create.
They finally released some news about this probe. Apparently on the outside of the sealed container there was some asteroid material as well. It looked a lot like coal. It had lots of carbon and even some water in it. Lots of neat stuff will be learned here !
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